Mark Robinson at subtitling company Independent Media Support (http://www.ims-media.com) gave the following useful information:
*Captioning/subtitling software is normally provided bespoke by companies such as SysMedia (http://www.sysmedia.com) and SofTel (http://www.softel.co.uk).
*Subtitling is normally farmed out to specialist companies. Only a few of the major broadcasters (BBC, etc.) keep it in house.
*It should be theoretically possible for the text normally sent to the monitor/screen to be diverted to another application for further processing (and so the text becomes the machine-readable label for each element), although he has never heard of it being done before.
Also spoke to John Boulton at Sysmedia, who explained the following:
*Subtitles are generated from the data not as text within a template, but as bitmaps. The larger part of the application is processing that conversion.
Posted by ken at May 10, 2004 03:55 PM