Question / Help Simulate Realtime Subtitles

[ossosso]

Hi!
My name is Daniele, I'm 32 and I'm from Italy.
First of all I thank you in advance for reading this post and for your assistance.
Please forgive me for my english, I'll try to be as clear and short as possible.

Because of an eyes deasease I've reorganized my job, and learnt something where I needn't my sight: transcriber.
Through a special keyboard or a voice recognize application I can rewrite in realtime the spoken. It appears to be useful also to make realtime subtitles for hearing impaired.

I am not able to find a tool which allows me to overlay subtitles on videos, or any kind of presentation, in realtime.

A common situation is the following: an event like a conference where a speaker connects his laptop to a projector and while he is speaking he runs his slideshow, or powerpoint presentation, or maybe a video, anything it needs to show the audience.

What I'd like to do is to put in overlay and always on top his window application, a text field where to type subtitles (with transparent background, only text).

I can't figure out how to solve these issues:
-Realtime: everything should happen, I think, in a LAN. Working via Internet could cause some strange delay
-Control: While the speaker controls his presentation (click, drag and drop, type, etc.), it cannot interfere with subtitles text field where I'm writing.

Do you think that OBS could be set to do that?

Thank you very much.

Daniele.

 

[FerretBomb]

Not really what OBS is meant for, no.

If you had a capture device, you could capture the presentation into OBS (plug their laptop into your capture card) and then overlay a text layer set to watch a text file on-disk. If you then had a program that would automatically save whatever you typed to disk as you were typing, it would show in real-time then. You could then set OBS Projector Mode on the output to the projector, for the presentation.
You would likely have issues with capture speed (assuming a laptop and USB capture device) and potentially quality issues.

A more purpose-built application would likely be better. OBS isn't meant to be an overlay-adding application, it's a broadcasting suite.

 

[ossosso]

I thank you very much FerretBomb for your fast and useful answer.

Unfortunatly when we talk about a more purpose-built application we refer to high performance/expensive hardware and software solution; they are used for important live television events, but doesn't exist a solution for smaller situation and events like could be an university conference of 200 people, affordable for freelancer like I am. In those cases I have to "mix" tools (hardware and software) to better realize a workflow, stronger and reliabler as I can.

After a long research I've settled here in this forum, because I've red a tutorial on how to overlay a chat window on a videogame window.

Basically it does exactly what I need:
-Add a "Window Capture" source
-Choose a Wordprocessor like could be "MS Word" with white letters and black background
-Use Color Key to make transparent the black background

In this way the text will scroll in realtime

If, as you said, OBS can use like source another laptop monitor via a capture card, and then use the option projector to output the result, well, I think that the problem could be solved in some way. The only issue, as you said, could be speed, but I can make some test for that.

I have not clear how to output from presentation laptop to mine.

 

[Elliot Roberts]

Hi Daniele,

One software/hardware system I can recommend for this purpose would be Text On Top (http://text-on-top.com/en/). It's designed for non-broadcast use, such as live events and meetings. It's really easy to use and set up, but it's a little expensive.

It essentially simulates real-time captioning, but actually looks a lot nicer and cleaner, and it can be applied on top of almost any video source.

I hope that helps!

- Elliot
www.netcaptioning.com

 

[FerretBomb]

Unfortunately it will show the text as you're typing, if you use Word, rather than one completed line at a time. Also, each line will not auto-clear or scroll; you'll have to select-all and delete it, or otherwise come up with a way to only show a single line of text each time. Possibly using a large font and sizing the Word window to only show one or two lines, and hitting enter at the end of each could work, but also could lead to unexpected issues (partial lines, incorrect wrapping, etc).

Output from the presentation laptop would need a capture device like the Elgato HD60, Avermedia Extremecap U3, or XCAPTURE-1. Expect to spend around $200-300 for a USB capture device supporting full-res video. I would recommend either of the latter two, as the Elgato USB offerings tend to have about 2 seconds of delay.

Really, a software suite like text on top or similar would probably cost about the same, but be far simpler to use and with less chance of issues, along with likely being lighter weight/running on lower-spec machines than OBS is capable of doing.

 

[ossosso]

In my researches I have never found "Text-On-Top" website.
That's a cool application and probably it iwll solve all of my needs.

I thank you very very much for your really useful support.

Have a nice day!