I'm working on a video streaming application, where compatibility has so far been limited to Windows and IE (though it seems to work well enough on Firefox as well)
I have been tasked to get it to work on Macs, and in the future Unix as well, but I figure that if I get Macs to work, UNIX will follow.
We're using a Windows Media Streaming Server, with an .asx playlist file containing the streaming media. The URLs may also contain a subtitle file, and it goes a little somethin' like this:
mms://192.168.xx.xxx/video/movie99.wmv?SAMI=http://192.168.xx.yyy/subs/movie99.smi
Now, I'm pretty lost when it comes to Mac OSX, but I managed to get the video working with Flip4Mac, which seems to be some kind of "Microsoft Kit" for Quicktime. I also got it to work with a VLC plugin in Firefox and Safari. However, I can't for the life of me get the subtitles to work.
I'm willing to hear whatever solutions you can think of. Javascript magic? Install something on the mac? Use java web start to launch an app that runs a commandline argument starting vlc with the subtitle file? Hit me :)
The only solution I don't want to hear is "Make a youtube" and stuff like that. Simple solutions where we don't have to rewrite all of our core functionality is appreciated :)
Regards, Ace
Unfortunately, outside of Windows Media Player, streaming subtitles is definitely not easy:
http://wiki.videolan.org/Subtitles even says so.
If you have the source video available to you, I think your best bet would be to have alternative media served to platforms other than Windows/IE.
You could code Javascript for the browser detection and then request to proper URL (i.e. Streaming Media/Subtitles for Windows, Streaming Media or Streaming Media with embedded subtitles if subtitles are requested).
I did a quick search for embedding subtitles and netted this post. It has some links to tools used to embed subtitles in your media:
http://mwolk.com/blog/how-to-embed-subtitles-into-videos/
Good luck!