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Community & Business Groups

Web Media Text Tracks Community Group

This group will work on text tracks for video on the Web, applied to captioning, subtitling and other purposes. This group plans to work initially on: 1) Documenting a semantic model underlying the caption formats in use, notably TTML, CEA 608/708, EBU STL, and WebVTT. 2) Creating a community specification for WebVTT. 3) Defining the mappings between WebVTT and some selected formats, including at least TTML (W3C/SMPTE), and CEA 608/708. 4) Creating web developer reference and tutorial material, including worked examples. 5) Creating a test suite and/or tools. A possible transition to REC-track for some of these document(s) is envisaged and that possibility will be used to guide the work and procedures. The group may produce recommendations for work in other groups, such as CSS, HTML5, and TTWG.

w3c/webvtt/

Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time

Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.

final reports / licensing info

date name commitments
WebVTT Licensing commitments

drafts / licensing info

name
WebVTT
Conversion of 608/708 captions to WebVTT

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CG started

Welcome to the newly started “Web Media Text Tracks Community Group” – also by some called the “Captioning CG” or the “WebVTT CG”.

Our work will encompass more than just captioning and more than just WebVTT, therefore the broader title. But we will indeed have a large focus on captioning to begin with and one core aim is to make sure WebVTT offers all the features that a professional captioning format requires.

We will start discussions once representatives of the major browser vendors have joined. It is their implementation work that we want to guide through this group and their questions that we want to address.

Note that I’ve started a WebVTT twitter channel where I am planning to post about the discussion results and spec changes that we make in this CG. If anyone would like to help me with the twitter channel, let me know and I can add you as an author.

I’m looking forward to a flourishing and very productive new CG!