Kaltura HTML5 Video And Media JavaScript Library and Problems With Captions

I wanted to quickly highlight an issue I ran into with the great Kaltura HTML5 Video and Media JavaScript library. I'm using it commercially as a way to deliver video messages to clients across platforms in conjunction with Amazon S3. As I highlighted previously I go into great agony making sure these videos are accessible via captions/subtitles.

The Kaltura HTML5 Video and Media JavaScript Library uses javascript to load the srt caption files. This makes caption files unable to be hosted on content delivery networks like S3. In Javascript as well as a little bit of Flash(unless the programmer makes specific allowances) there is a security policy called same origin which prevents the caption files form being loaded from a different domain via javascript. My S3 solution dynamically uses their notion of expiring links so people can't crawl my site and see marketing content. The fact that my caption files couldn't be served on S3 caused a lot of pain for me.

I came up with the solution to use my own server side scripts to make a copy of the srt captions from S3 on demand, then use cron in Linux, to periodically purge all caption files. (This site is hosted on Gentoo by a very talented admin, not myself). This really is a patch of a solution that really frustrated me with Kaltura. But how could they load captions and remain fully compliant? The only way I can think of is to provide some sort of proxy, but it sill messes up the S3 paradigm no matter what. Don't get me wrong, I still like Kaltura; but had trouble finding any documentation for solutions on this. In the trunk right now it looks like they are working on solutions to this.

A great solution would be to allow loading of captions by text embedded in the web page. That way server side scripts could dynamically pull captions from anywhere and incorporate it into the dynamic page.