News
March 23, 2010

WGBH's National Center for Accessible Media and Research in Motion Enable Closed-Captioning Support for BlackBerry® Smartphones

The WGBH - Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) today announced a new version of its popular do-it-yourself caption-authoring tool for digital media, the Media Access Generator, or MAGpie. MAGpie 2.5.0 (Windows), jointly funded by Research in Motion® and NCAM/WGBH, extends the ability of the free software to export TTXT files, which can be used to create closed-captioned videos formatted for playback on BlackBerry® smartphones. As before, authors can continue to write captions once and export them to formats compatible with QuickTime, Windows Media, RealPlayer and Flash.

The updated MAGpie software also includes an option to use MP4Box to automatically combine a TTXT file into a copy of MP4 or 3GP source videos. Captioned videos can then be loaded onto compatible BlackBerry smartphones where users can decode closed captions.

Support for closed-captioned content playback is available on BlackBerry smartphones running BlackBerry Device Software version 5.0 and newer, including the BlackBerry Storm2™ smartphone, BlackBerry Bold 9700™ smartphone and BlackBerry Curve™ 8530 smartphone models.

Revised MAGpie documentation and additional information is available now from NCAM.

About NCAM and WGBH

The Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH is a research, development and advocacy entity that works to make existing and emerging technologies accessible to all audiences. NCAM is part of the Media Access Group at WGBH, which also includes The Caption Center (est. 1972), and Descriptive Video Service® (est. 1990). For more information, visit the Media Access Group's Web site, access.wgbh.org and follow the Media Access Group on Facebook and Twitter (AccessWGBH).

WGBH Boston is America's preeminent public broadcasting producer, the source of fully one-third of PBS's prime-time lineup, along with some of public television's best-known lifestyle shows and children's programs and many public radio favorites. Podcasts, vodcasts, iPhone apps, and more...WGBH creates content audiences use and value on the air, online, and on the go. Find more information at wgbh.org.

Contact

Mary Watkins
Media Access Group at WGBH
617 300-3700