Is it possible to play a video on iPhone and have a subtitles synchronized with it show up?

Question

I want to add a "subtitles" to a video played in an iPhone app. I don't want those subtitles encoded into the video itself - ideally I'd love to have a view showing the video (with pause, play, volume and such standard controls) together with a view displaying the text that changes together with movie time changing.

If I drawn that, it's something like this,

So, basicly, I would need a way to get a method called when movie is playing, and then synchronize the text displayed on the label with the movie timing.

Anyone used a solution that was able to do it?

Heartstrings

Would the video be on the device (local) or streaming? If streaming you could encode on the fly using something like this: tuaw.com/2011/02/08/… from ericasadun.com she may have some code for encoding that you could use for local video playback as well. Are you going to use a .srt file for the subtitle(s)? – Palmation

can we edit using the changing text in the video like movies in which names of actor comes one by one. – Artful

Answer 1

I've recently done something that syncs graphics to times in an audio track. The way I did it was by using the currentPlaybackTime property of the MPMediaPlayback interface (which the MoviePlayer controller should also conform to). This returns the seconds elapsed in the media, in a double (typedef'ed as NSTimeInterval). The actual synchronisation in my app was not done in notifications, as I couldn't find any resembling a "tick", but instead I created a timer, calling a function queried the currentPlaybackTime, and updated the graphics based on this.

In terms of your implementation, I would assume you have some kind of system for associating label text (subtitles) with a particular time. You could then compare the text's time range with the time returned from currentPlaybackTime to find the correct text to display.

Tanah

can we edit using the changing text in the video like movies in which names of actor comes one by one. – Artful