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Software for Creating Captions

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MAGpie
1. Versions of MAGpie
Hi-Caption

Translations

Translations of this article are available in:

German - External Link - courtesy of Anatoli Bauer

MAGpie

Media Access Generator (MAGpie) - external link was developed by the CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) - external link. This software tool is designed to make it easy for multimedia content developers to add captions to their audio and video content. MAGpie allows the captioning of web audio and video content for use in Quicktime, RealPlayer, and Window Media Player.

Note

All of the movies on the WebAIM site have been captioned using MAGpie.

Versions of MAGpie

There are versions of MAGpie currently available for free download - external link :

MAGpie 1.0 can be used to export the captions to three multimedia formats: Microsoft's Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange (SAMI) format - external link, RealText - external link for use with RealPlayer, and Apple's QuickTime format - external link. It will also export the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) format - external link, which is a display language used to display captions in Quicktime and RealPlayer. Although you can export the captions to Quicktime, Real and Windows Media, MAGpie 1.0 can only caption media files that are in Windows Media format.
MAGpie 2.01 is the most recent version of their popular web captioning tool. MAGpie 2 includes all of the features of MAGpie 1, and adds functionality to allow audio descriptions and captioning for Macromedia Flash. MAGpie 2 can play most media files, not just Windows Media, and is available for both Macintosh and Windows computers.

Although MAGpie 2 has more features and supports more formats, version 1 is easier to install and provides all the features that most users will ever need. Both versions are still valuable.

Hi-Caption

Hi-Caption is HiSoftware's solution to help web content developers quickly create synchronized captions for web multimedia. Hi-Caption provides a development environment that allows users to caption and synchronize captions to content while they listen to or watch their media files. Hi-Caption initially saves the files as Microsoft's SAMI files, but these files can be converted to RealPlayer and Quicktime SMIL files with RealText and Quicktime Text. The file name SAMI stands for Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange and SMIL for the World Wide Web Consortium's Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language. Additionally, Hi-Caption seamlessly integrates with HiSoftware's other accessibility testing and monitoring solutions (i.e. AccVerify, AccRepair, and AccMonitor).