Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange (SAMI) is a Microsoft accessibility initiative released in the summer of 1998. The structured markup language is designed to simplify creating subtitles for media playback on a PC.

Overview

A SAMI file provides closed caption support for multimedia formats. Generally, a multimedia file (such as a video or a sound file) is played by a media player such as Windows Media Player. Media players that support closed captioning and SAMI format may display the contents of the included SAMI file. A SAMI file is a plain text file and therefore can be created or modified in any text editor. Its structure is very similar to HTML. The files may have either or filename extensions, although using may cause a filename extension collision, since Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) files and Macintosh self mounting images also use this filename extension.

Supported HTML tags and CSS

SAMI format is similar to HTML and CSS; in fact, SAMI implements a subset of both. SAMI does not require strict tag matching.

Example

Here's an example SAMI file. It sets the time to milliseconds. It uses CSS for formatting both the source and text lines and it supports language selection. (English and faux-French shown). Each SYNC block sets the start time for the caption. A new caption is displayed every second (1000ms). The identifies the language. The (matching the in the CSS identifier definition) indicates the source/speaker line; the default is the closed caption. The identifier name need not be "Source"; it may be any name. The Microsoft parser is fragile. Formatting information can be added to the closed caption information, but adding format information to the source line can have unpredictable results. Defining more than one ID can have unpredictable results.

Association with media

The player needs to know how to associate a particular media file to a SAMI file. Sometimes that is achieved by using the same filename as the underlying media file. For example, when Windows Media Player (WMP) opens the sound file cheap44.wav, it checks to see if the file cheap44.smi exists in the same folder. If it does, WMP uses that file to display closed captions. Alternatively, the association can be made explicit using an entry in an Advanced Stream Redirector (ASX) file. The user opens the ASX file instead.

Software support

The following is a list of software that can play SAMI along with multimedia content: