I spent the weekend discovering just how poorly thought out and poorly supported closed captioning is in online video. Some highlights (based on the SRT format because that was the only one I could find any information about syntax for):

• Definitive guides to the format either don’t exist or are so poorly used that they don’t appear in the first 3-4 pages of a Google search.
• Timestamps use a non-standard format. The inventor was apparently French so instead of the usual hh:mm:ss.ttt the period is replaced with a comma. I sympathise with everything being US-centric, but the number of people who were making this mistake on forums etc and the number of players who support period but not comma (and visa-versa) is scary.
• Only DOS line endings are supported. \r\n is fine as part of the standard, but why can’t players be a little liberal in what they accept? It’s not like \n or \r by itself within the caption is going to work anyway…
• No standard font, so no way to know if the caption will fit or not.
• Absolutely zero feedback from any player I found about why it was ignoring the captions.
• Really, really poor tooling support for creating captions.

So, coming around to the real point of this post, I wound up writing my own tool to help take a script, synchronize it to the spoken voice and output the right format. Worked a treat, and now I have working captions on my video. I suspect it would be useful to others and there’s certainly plenty to do to improve it that would be great if others jumped in and helped with.

The trouble is, to make playing the video easier, I used Cocoa and Objective-C. Great decision, got me up and running in no time – with really, really, really, lousy code. See, I haven’t done anything more than vaguely dabble in Objective-C and I’ve only used XCode back when it was Project Builder and I suspect OS X was in beta. Needless to say, the resulting code is terrible. I didn’t want to learn all the ins and outs of the Cocoa document system and where I’d have to change the names of things so the main document class is still called “MyDocument”. I think I turned on the Objective-C garbage collection, but if not it will leak like a sieve (it might anyway, not sure).

If you look at it one way, it’s pretty impressive to pick up a completely new tool set and get a useful application out in a morning, but more likely you’d look at the code and decide I was incompetent. So the great dilemma, should I push this rubbish code up to GitHub and hope someone comes along to refactor it, or will it just sit there waiting to appear in a Google search when I next wind up applying for a job, thus killing all my hopes and dreams?