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Rebekah1's avatar
Rebekah1
Channel Surfer
6 years ago
Solved

Subtitles & Vimeo

I'm a first-time developer, currently using Direct Publisher, as I am not a coder. I have a group of 13 videos that I'd like to make available for streaming through a Roku app. I thought this would b...
Roku Direct Publisher
  • Rebekah1's avatar
    Rebekah1
    6 years ago

    Yeah, so, unfortunately it's an issue with Vimeo - for some reason, the feed they provide doesn't supply caption information to Roku (no idea why - it works just fine with AmazonFire TV...) We have captions uploaded to our videos on Vimeo, but they don't translate through the feed. Ultimately, we had to hire a company to code a new feed for us - they took Vimeo's MRSS feed and turned it into a JSON feed, which we can add .srt caption files too. It's a cumbersome solution for such a simple task, but once we got it up and running, it works!

Rebekah1's avatar
Rebekah1
Channel Surfer
6 years ago

Okay, not what I wanted to hear...but thank you for your expertise! I appreciate you taking the time to help me with this. Hopefully Vimeo/Roku will update their support for captions soon!

freetochoose's avatar
freetochoose
Streaming Star
6 years ago

another option you have is to get a caption making software. My company uses it and it has worked fine for years on our old channel. We created .srt files from our videos using captioning software. 

We are trying to build a channel using the Direct Publisher software now and are running into caption issues. I am currently trying to find out what the issue is but there isn't much info on it unfortunately.

Have you found an answer to your problem? We too have our videos hosted on vimeo.

  • Rebekah1's avatar
    Rebekah1
    Channel Surfer
    6 years ago

    Yeah, so, unfortunately it's an issue with Vimeo - for some reason, the feed they provide doesn't supply caption information to Roku (no idea why - it works just fine with AmazonFire TV...) We have captions uploaded to our videos on Vimeo, but they don't translate through the feed. Ultimately, we had to hire a company to code a new feed for us - they took Vimeo's MRSS feed and turned it into a JSON feed, which we can add .srt caption files too. It's a cumbersome solution for such a simple task, but once we got it up and running, it works!

  • Baradanikto's avatar
    Baradanikto
    Roku Guru
    6 years ago

    Let's clear up some confusion here.  You don't need to use the SDK to incorporate captions in your Direct Publisher channel.  DP does support a Caption object.  I've used it and it worked.

    • freetochoose's avatar
      freetochoose
      Streaming Star
      6 years ago

      I can't seem to get my captions to work in DP. I am using the same captions that I used  with my SDK channel (same link and everything). I tried the format that was shown. I will post example below

      {
      "id": "21",
      "title": "Sweden: Lessons for America?",
      "shortDescription": "It’s been suggested that Americans would be better off if the United States had a more socialist economy, like Sweden. Do the Swedes know something that we don’t? Sweden: Lessons for America? delves into the economic and social landscape of the Swedish scholar’s homeland. Join him to see that the lessons to be learned from Sweden on Democratic Socialism may not be the ones you expect.",
      "thumbnail": "https://freetochoosenetwork.org/roku/ftc/images/broadcasts/sweden.jpg",
      "genres": ["documentary", "educational"],
      "tags": ["", "", "", "", ""],
      "releaseDate": "2018-09-08",
      "content": {
      "dateAdded": "2018-09-08T14:14:54.431Z",
      "duration": 3403,
      "videos": [{
      "url": "https://player.vimeo.com/external/271911115.hd.mp4?s=28e072c9ea9d582bf733a014e0f603c0d0a5120a",
      "quality": "HD",
      "videoType": "MP4"
      }],
      "captions": [{
      "url": "https://freetochoosenetwork.org/roku/ftc/srt/sweden.srt",
      "language": "en",
      "captionType": "CLOSED_CAPTION"
      }]
      }
      }

       

      • Baradanikto's avatar
        Baradanikto
        Roku Guru
        6 years ago
        I can't seem to get my captions to work in DP

        Does this mean that they do not display?  Have you set closed captioning on?  I recently checked my channel to ensure that CC works and it does.