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The Track Element
3:51Caption files won't work without adding a track element. In this video, we'll learn how to use a WebVTT file as a text track.
Now we've created our caption file, but
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just creating that file
isn't quite enough.
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It's not just going to magically appear in
the video that we want it to appear in,
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we actually need to include it into our
HTML file, just like any other file.
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So right here under video,
we're going to add
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a new element that we haven't seen yet
called track.
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So let's type out the track element, and
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this is a self closing element
just like the sources.
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And we'll label this with
the label attribute, and
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we'll say, this is an English track.
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Now, I should point out.
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This is not necessarily labelling
the language in particular.
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It could label, for example,
director's commentary.
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Or any other thing that you might
want to include as a text track.
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However in this case it's just the English
subtitles for this particular video.
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For kind the kind attribute we're going
to say capture you will notice this work
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space automatically completing this and is
giving us a couple of other options here.
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One of those options is subtitles.
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And actually we're going to choose
subtitles only because that has a tendency
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to have slightly better compatibility than
captions in some specific situations.
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So we're going to choose subtitles
hover technically these are captions
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because subtitles are typically what you
use to translate into another language.
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These are technically just captions
because they're sort of just captioning
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what’s happening in the video.
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However we're going to choose
subtitles for compatibility reasons.
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For source language, this is where
you want to specify a language.
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We're going to say en for English and
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then for the source attribute.
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We're going to say bridge-captions.vtt,
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because that's the file
that we just created.
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And it's in the same
directory as the HTML.
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So we don't need to specify a folder.
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And then, for the last attribute,
we're going to say Default.
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Now why are we saying that?
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Well we're going to have captions
enabled by default, just so
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we can easily see them.
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You might want to remove this, but this
means that this will be the track that's
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selected by default, and
it will display it by default.
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So let's save that out,
switch over to our example and
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I want you to watch the player
controls down here very closely.
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We'll refresh the page and as you can see,
there's now this little CC button.
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That stands for Closed Captioning.
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So if we hit play, and
we'll mute the audio.
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You can see that we now
have these subtitles here.
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And that's pretty nice if you're not
able to watch the video with audio for
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some reason or another.
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Kinda tells you what's going on.
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But if we re-enable captions,
or re-enable audio rather,
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you can see that it matches up pretty
well to what's actually going on.
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Like any HTML element there's a lot
more you can do with video and
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audio, that about covers the basics.
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If you'd like to learn more about
anything that we've talked about,
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be sure to check out the notes
associated with each video,
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and familiarize yourself with
the official documentation.
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