The Hybrid Lecture Player is a platform that allows you to turn your lecture documentation into a multi-format publication, with a toolkit with features such as subtitle transcription, transcription in prose form, translations, and embedded lecture material such as images, audio and visual files. Everything is synched and information can be accessed via multiple channels, through custom tables of contents and sections.
You can find an online demo here https://hlp.consortium.io/
Here you can find the player used on a lecture about Marshall McLuhan's experimental media practice by the historian and curator Graham Larkin, call 'Finally Getting the Message: McLuhan's Media Practice', given at the Marshall McLuhan Salon, Canadian Embassy, Berlin, in 2011. http://www.mcluhan-salon.de/
Lecture link https://mcluhan.consortium.io/
Here is a map of the features that the Hybrid Lecture Player proposes:
├── css ==> style folder
│ └── app.css style of the Hybrid Lecture Player
├── data ==> captions, slides and sync. folder
│ ├── captions.xml file where the captions are encoded
│ ├── captions-LanguageCode.xml captions in various languages
│ ├── ContextualHtml.xml additional materials
│ │ (bottom-right box)
│ ├── paragraphs.xml sync. of the paragraphs and the video
│ └── SlidesInPoints.xml sync. of the slides and the video
├── html ==> transcriptions folder
│ ├── transcription.html file where the transcription is encoded
│ └── transcription-LanguageCode.html transcription in various languages
├── images ==> slides folder
│ └── …
├── index.html the structure of the HLP’s page
└── js ==> javascript folder
├── HybridVideo.js synchronization scripts
└── scrollTo automatic scrolling in the transcription
You can download this repository and start using it on your computer, opening the file index.html in your favorite browser to see a local preview of the Hybrid Lecture Player. We recommend the use of Firefox, as the preview doesn’t work well in all browsers.
To produce the subtitles, we use the open source subtitle editor Amara http://www.amara.org/fr/.
The rest is simply html and javascript!
For the moment, we use Youtube for the video part of the Hybrid Lecture Player. If you want to serve your video on your own server, you can also use Pandora, which is our next step for the Hybrid Lecture Player. But things still need to be set for Pandora.
In the folder js, find the HybridVideo.js file and open it in your favourite text editor.
In the part starting on line 408 in HybridVideo.js, line 411 indicates the id of the Youtube video. The id of a youtube video is visible at the end of its url. For instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-WG3biOXto
player = new YT.Player('player', {
height: '390',
width: '640',
videoId: 'z-WG3biOXto',
events: {
'onReady': onPlayerReady,
'onStateChange': onPlayerStateChange
},
playerVars: {
'showinfo' : 0,
'autohide': 1
}
});
Change videoId: 'z-WG3biOXto', to the correct YouTube video id.
Exporting subtitles from Amara to create captions in 'Captions.xml'
From Amara export the subtitles as .dxfp, save it somewhere on your computer, and open it in a text editor.
Select all the <p> tags that are inside <body region="bottom"><div> (without the <div> around) and copy them.
In the folder data, find the captions.xml file and open it in a text editor.
Paste the selection from the .dxfp file into the captions.xml file, inside the <div xml:id="captions"></div> tag. When editing the .xml file, the structure of the data should be kept the same, all tags should retain their attributes.
When the captions don’t start immediately at the beginning, the first caption displayed will be an error message. (whenever there is nothing during a time period, it displays the message) You can manually add an information that replaces the error message For instance:
<p begin="00:00:00.000" end="00:00:37.563">Subtitles will start at 00:37</p>
<p begin="00:00:37.564" end="00:00:37.946">(The content starts here!)</p>Edit the file SlideInPoints.xml in the folder data to change the inpoints of the slides. Make sure the inpoints are sequential and in the correct format e.g. 00:00:00.000, 00:00:05.500 etc. If they are not then this will cause problems.
It doesn't matter how many are there and at present the id addtributes are not used and these do not need to be sequential (for the moment).
The slide images should all be contained in the images folder, these do not need to be named in any particular format.
Their resolution must be of 1000px x 750px 72 dpi
In the root folder, open index.html in a text editor, and edit lines 49 to change the title of the project.
<div class="title-lecture">Forever Blowing Bubbles: A Walking Tour with Peter Linebaugh and Fabian Tompsett</div>Still in index.html, change the <span> content inside the divs with class attribute chapter-title to change the sections’ titles.
To link the sections to a precise point in the video:
Set the inpoint of the chapter in seconds inside the attribute onclick i.e. onclick="goToChapter(764)" = points at 764 seconds.
If you want to point at that time: 00:34:31.667, multiply it by 60 and add the seconds:
(34 x 60) + 31 + 1 (rounds up the part of the last second) = 764
To go from the seconds to a minutes representation, divide it by 60, which makes 34.31666666… which corresponds to 00:34:31.667
to synch the precis and the chapters (on mouseover):
The number between the parenthesis of changePrecisContent() (in index.html) must correspond the numbers inside HybridVideo.js function changePrecisContent(chapterNumber), starting on line 518.
case 6:
document.getElementById("precis").innerHTML = "Surveys some fresh evidence for McLuhan’s interests in rhetoric, including public speaking";
break;Adapt the numbers in case …: so that they correspond to changePrecisContent() in index.html.
To change the precis content, edit the HybridVideo.js file inside document.getElementById("precis").innerHTML = "…";, on line 518, for instance.
The number in onmouseleave="changePrecisContent()" indicate the default precis, when the mouse is not on the sections’ area.
You can choose any id number but it needs to be unique and needs to correspond in the HybridVideo.js
The full transcript can be found in the file transcript.html, in the html folder.
To create this file you need to copy all the <p> tags from data/captions.xml and paste them into this document.
Then comes a series of find and replace:
Each span should have the attribute onclick="goToSentence(this)". Use find and replace to add this to each span.
You will need to add an id attribute to each span in the format id="lineID0001" where there are 4 digits for the lineID number.
So each line should be in this format:
<span id="lineID0001" begin="00:00:03.436" end="00:00:05.748" onclick="goToSentence(this)">So, ladies and gentleman. Let’s take a seat.</span>
<span id="lineID0002" begin="00:00:05.748" end="00:00:07.303" onclick="goToSentence(this)">We will be starting shortly.</span>etc...
You can add your own html to break it into paragraphs and add headings, the important things is to keep the ids continuous and sequential.
To add a new language:
Create a file for each language with the name the the language: in the data and html folders, duplicate the files you want to translate (captions.xml or transcription.html for instance), and change the name of the file using the language code at the end of the name: captions-LanguageCode.xml.
In the file index.html, in the part <div id="language-button"> starting on line 177, add another line for the new language:
<option value='4'>Spanish</option>If you want to set a language as a default, add selected="selected" in the <option> element:
<option value='4' selected="selected">Spanish</option>In HybridVideo.js, in the part function changeLanguage(index), on line 653, add an extra case for each extra language:
case 4:
loadSpanish();
break;
The case number corresponds to the <option value=''>.
Just after in the HybridVideo.js file, in the part strating on line 678, add a new language function:
function loadSpanish()
{
$.ajax({
type: "GET",
url: "data/captions-ES.xml",
dataType: "xml",
success: parseLanguageCaptions
});
$("#transcription").load("html/transcription-ES.html");
}
In the folder data, open the file ContextualHtml.xml in a text editor.
Edit the starting time at which the additional material should be added, corresponding to the video, and its end time. In [CDATA[]] insert the iframe of a new video, like that: [CDATA[<iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bx9zIGxQ-zE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>]]
Each part like the following extract represents an additional material:
<!-- Bob Dylan Don't Look Back Interview -->
<xtra begin="01:18:00" end="01:18:30"><![CDATA[<iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mnl5X5MQKTg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>]]></xtra>When there is nothing in the box during a time period here is what should be written in the code:
<!-- Title of the additional element -->
<xtra begin="00:00:00" end="01:18:00"><![CDATA[]]></xtra>Print and save a pdf of the page from the browser (doesn’t work in every browsers) in the root folder, and name it manual.pdf (replace the previous one if necessary). It will automatically be linked to the PDF button in the file ìndex.html.
Hybrid Lecture Player software is licenced as GNU Affero General Public Licensehttp://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.txt
Design Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en
All software dependencies are copyright to their respective owners. All fonts are copyright to their respective owners.
This Case Study is a project by the Hybrid Publishing Consortium (HPC), a research project with a mission to support the development of open source software for public infrastructures in publishing. HPC pursues a model of digital interoperability, frameworks as opposed to platforms, that combines ISO standards with experimental approaches to dynamic publishing, using existing Open Source expert projects.
HPC develops concepts for new forms of access to information, and specializes within their research in Museums, Libraries and Archives publishing.
Funded by the EU major project Innovation Incubator Lüneburg.
Hybrid Publishng Consortium develops open source software infrastructures for publishing and is part of the Hybrid Publishing Lab at the Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany and is funded by the European Union and the German federal State of Lower Saxony.