Introduction to MAGpie

Please read this entire document before installing and using MAGpie.

This document describes the basic procedure for creating captions and subtitles for, and integrating audio descriptions with, digital multimedia using the PC-based Media Access Generator (MAGpie).

MAGpie was produced by the CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) with funding provided by the Trace Research and Development Center as part of its Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) grant from the U.S. Department of Education's National Institute on Disability, Research and Rehabilitation. A revision history can be found at the end of this document.

In this manual, menus are indicated with CAPITAL LETTERS, submenus are in mixed case, and specific keys are enclosed by <less-than and greater-than signs>.

MAGpie is a PC-based basic editor for the creation of captions and subtitles for digital multimedia. Using MAGpie, you can author captions and subtitles for playback with three playback engines: Windows Media Object using SAMI (Synchronized Accessible Multimedia Interchange) format, Apple's QuickTime Player using QTtext, and RealNetworksí RealPlayer G2 and above using SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language format). MAGpie also has the capability to sequence audio descriptions in the RealPlayer.

This manual discusses captioning and subtitle creation in Section I, and audio descriptions in Section II. Even if you are only interested in adding audio descriptions to your multimedia, please read Section I as most of the information contained there applies to audio descriptions as well.

MAGpie simulates the final output of multimedia files using the Windows Media Player Object. Therefore, your source media must be compatible with the Windows Media Player. Acceptable media formats include:

  1. Windows Media formats: .ASF, .ASX.

  2. .AVI

  3. MPEG (.mpg, .mpeg, .m1v, .mp2, .mpa, .mpe)

  4. MIDI (.mid, .midi)

  5. Apple QuickTime (.qt, .aif, .aifc, .aiff, .mov)

  6. Sun Microsystems and NeXT (.au, .snd)

  7. .WAV

(Note: Windows Media Player version 6.4.05 and lower will play some Real Media files, as long as they are encoded in the Real 4.0 format or lower. Real Media files above version 4.0 are not supported by Windows Media Player.)

You can output your captions or subtitles in three formats: The W3C's SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) via RealText, Apple's QuickTime and Microsoft's SAMI (Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange) format. See Section I, Part E , for further details.

Please note: Although MAGpie automates much of the captioning and subtitling process, you must still type the text into MAGpie by hand or import caption text from another source. MAGpie does not incorporate a spell checker.

If you have comments, suggestions or bug reports about MAGpie, please share them with the MAGPIE listserv.

To subscribe, send an email with the subject "subscribe magpie" to:

requests@mail4.wgbh.org

You can send messages to the list and your messages will be sent to the

other list subscribers. Send messages to::

magpie@wgbh.org

To receive help, send an email with the subject "help" to requests@mail4.wgbh.org.

To be removed from the list, send an email with the subject "unsubscribe magpie" to:

requests@mail4.wgbh.org

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