Inspiration
Deaf people have a difficult time going to movie theaters because many of them don't support open captioning, and the closed captioning devices they are given are slow, skip dialogue, and EXPENSIVE. There needs to be a better way to accommodate those with hearing disabilities.
What it does
Distributed Captions is an open-source caption-streaming platform. It allows captions from a video source to be streamed directly to multiple devices via a central websocket server. This means that ANY device can be used to stream closed captions, including your phone!
How I built it
It's divided into two sections -- a Chrome extension, and a web app. The Chrome extension pulls captions from YouTube and sends it to the web app. The web app takes the captions and distributes it to the clients that are connected to it via websockets. The web app is build on Node.js and is deployed on Google App Engine.
Challenges I ran into
Google App Engine "standard" doesn't support websockets! I had to use the "flexible" deployment.
Working with "wss" instead of "ws" was also a pain.
What's next for distributed-captions
- Handle multiple theaters
- Expand past Youtube
- Latency algorithm
- Digest caption files (.srt)
- Design low-cost captioning devices
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