Hauppauge WinTV HVR 1800 CC support

[OldPCGUY]

For everone's information. I have :

Hauppauge WintV 1800 Dual Card
Windows XP SP2
Sage TV 6.3
Closed Caption Plugin (but only supports upto 6.2)

I have been trying like crazy to get closed captions to work first in Sage then in WINTV.

Sage TV States that they do not support CC but have an index in their manual that implies CC support on some of the older Hauppauge cards.

Hauppauge States that WINTV only supports CC with Windows XP Media.
Great! Buy a $100 card spend a month on it and then find out you are supposed to buy a bloated useless $300 OS just for CC. No Thanks!

Here is what I have discovered.
1. Get the Closed Caption Flag in the Sage.Properties file set to True. This allows you to turn on CC2 and CC2 via the Sage TV pop up menu.
2. Sage Also tells you to do a REG EDIT see the sage manual on CC support. I did this also.
3. I get CC on most digtal channels and none of the analog channels.
4. Of the digital channels I found that CC works on some Channels with the Power DVD MPEG decoder and others only work with the SAGE TV MPEG Decoder.
5. I did have the analog CC working at one point but I forgot what Sage setting I had working and I think it was an audio decoder setting that made it work. Does this make sense?
6. I downloaded and installed the Closed Caption Software Plugin for Sage but that plugin does no work properly with Sage 6.3. It only works with Sage 6.2.

I have downloaded the CCextractor software and will try that out this weekend and try to go back to my orginal Reg Edit Config and see if I can get closed captions to work for the analog
channels.

As a final try I will buy an older Hauppauge Card to see if one of those supports close captions.

[TechBill]

You will need to extract the CC using the ccextractor to an smi file before you can use the CC plugin.


Bill

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by OldPCGUY

1. Get the Closed Caption Flag in the Sage.Properties file set to True. This allows you to turn on CC2 and CC2 via the Sage TV pop up menu.

yup, that allows you to toggle the CC.

2. Sage Also tells you to do a REG EDIT see the sage manual on CC support. I did this also.

You shouldn't need to do this. that regedit is for the PVR-250/350 cards. The newer cards don't even add those key sections to the registry.

3. I get CC on most digtal channels and none of the analog channels.

CC in digital is embedded in the stream, for analog, the drivers have to re-embed the CC into the mpeg recording.

4. Of the digital channels I found that CC works on some Channels with the Power DVD MPEG decoder and others only work with the SAGE TV MPEG Decoder.

I saw the same thing iwth PowerDVD and WinDVD both displaying different amounts of CC. Basically there is some variation in the CC broadcast in the digital stream (there is a digital CC and a legacy analog CC available) and the different decoders may be only able to play certain versions. I haven't figured out the specifics yet.

5. I did have the analog CC working at one point but I forgot what Sage setting I had working and I think it was an audio decoder setting that made it work. Does this make sense?

What quality setting are you using for analog recordings. You need to use a DVD-quality setting. Most of the settings are dvd qualilty. There are a couple that are VCD/SVCD that don't do CC.

6. I downloaded and installed the Closed Caption Software Plugin for Sage but that plugin does no work properly with Sage 6.3. It only works with Sage 6.2.

the CC plugin works fine in 6.3. the plugin does not add CC capability to cards that don't do sage-style CC. It only allows you to display extracted CC that is in an .smi file, or to automate some stuff for the embedded captions.

I have downloaded the CCextractor software and will try that out this weekend and try to go back to my orginal Reg Edit Config and see if I can get closed captions to work for the analog
channels.

the ccextractor software will help you check the analog recordings and see if there is embedded cc in there. If there is, then you can work on the display side. If there isn't, then you need to work on the recording side.

As a final try I will buy an older Hauppauge Card to see if one of those supports close captions.

The PVR-500 is a good card to get, dual analog tuners and it does do CC in Sage just fine with the correct drivers.

Originally Posted by TechBill

You will need to extract the CC using the ccextractor to an smi file before you can use the CC plugin.

That is only if you to use the .smi files, for usage on an extender or placeshifter?. But for normal embedded captioning, you can use the CC plugin to just trigger the caption settings. that is the way I use the plugin, to auto-CC on mute and to assign a button to CC-toggle.