Closed Caption Possible

[sshapiro63]

Is it possible to view Closed Caption on live or recorded programs with any of the supported hardware?

[dkardatzke]

Not to my knowledge and we've talked about supporting it but it's very difficult to implement from what I understand.

Maybe Jeff can elaborate some more on if it's available anywhere.

[Narflex]

We'll add it at some point in the future, both the Hauppauge and Creative cards are capable of doing it. No estimate yet on when.

[mlar]

It should be reasonably easy to add it to SageTV, if the CC is displayed by SageTV itself, but I think it would be pretty hard, if at all possible, to have the TV render the CC (maybe if you use a hardware decoder, such as PVR-350 or X-Card). Personally I'd prefer if SageTV could render the CC text so you could customize the font/colors etc...

One cool thing would be if SageTV could index the CC data, so you could search for things being said in shows.. Lets say.. I have SageTV record X number of newscasts.. and I want to see if any of them where talking about Bin Laden or whatever, then I could just search for it, and it would tell me which programs mentioned him (and even at what timecode!). I can always dream I guess.. Or Sage could monitor shows for things I like.. maybe I like Robert DeNiro.. and he appears on tonight show that I usually dont record.. one of my tuners happen to be recording from this channel, and notices that today robert deniro appears on the tonight show, so it automatically keeps the show around for me with some special border color or something, so it gets my attention.

[Narflex]

mlar, it's funny should mentiont that.

I used to be Director of R&D at FasTV.com. What we did was index the closed captioning data from recorded television streams and used a search engine to index it and serve up video clips that matched the CC search results. That company went bankrupt and died like most dot coms....but I sure learned a lot while I was there.

[mlar]

I bet alot of market research companies would pay for something like that.. but I guess they already have technology to do that.

The funny thing about dot com is that there were plenty of good ideas, that still are good ideas, but they were implemented the wrong way. They hired 1000 people to do something that really should have been a 1-4 person company. Then there were some really bad ideas, but that's another story.

[justme]

Did any of you who have the PVR 250 ever get CC to work, even natively in WinTV? I could never get it to work. Except with the last driver release(21062), and then only by building a graph in graphedit. Sadly that driver version caused me serious sound glitches and I had to go back one version. SHS said a new version should be out soon, maybe even this week. Maybe this will have working CC.

I would love to have CC in SageTV, and would really love it if Sage could save CC to text. I often record shows anf later archive them to Xvid, and a CC text file would be of great use.

[JJarmoc]

mlar -
Not only that, but they hired 1000 people, gave them all stock options (dilluting shareholder value) and had pinball machines / nap rooms / free food / etc. I knew at least a few people who were all excited that they only did a couple hours of actual work a day, and could then play pool, get a massage, even have free beer. It doesn't take a rocket science to figure out that if you run a business like that, it won't last long.

[Durwood]

In particular I don't understand the observation made by mlar:

it would be pretty hard, if at all possible, to have the TV render the CC (maybe if you use a hardware decoder, such as PVR-350 or X-Card).

I don't know why having a hardware decoder would make this any easier to do. At any rate, Tivo does it: anything recorded on Tivo, even if dumped in the meantime on to VHS tape, has the closed captioning encoded in it and can be decoded by your TV.

As for the idea of having Sage decode the captioning beforehand, so you can set the fonts, etc., that's kind of a cute idea and might be a nice-to-have feature, but is no substitute for passing the CC signal through as Tivo does it. Being able to turn CC on and off by your TV is a considerably more useful feature.

[Lester Jacobs]

Originally posted by Durwood
...
As for the idea of having Sage decode the captioning beforehand, so you can set the fonts, etc., that's kind of a cute idea and might be a nice-to-have feature, but is no substitute for passing the CC signal through as Tivo does it. Being able to turn CC on and off by your TV is a considerably more useful feature.

I run SageTV using a big screen computer monitor (32") and not a TV. Therefore the only way that I could make use of CC functionality is if SageTV supported it natively. This is one feature that is being requested by my fiancee. She's a teacher for the deaf and hard of hearing and thus uses CC a lot. That's the one thing missing from SageTV that I was able to get using the ATI TV viewer app.

Hmm...maybe I should add this to the official feature request list.

Regards
Lester

[mlar]

The reason why I believe this is true, is because the CC signal is supposedly on scan line 21, and if you use TV out on your graphics card, you have no control over what gets displayed on what scan line. A hardware decoder on the other hand, does decoding and rendering on a per scan line basis, and knows exactly what scan line it is outputting to. The TiVo uses a hardware decoder (obviously), and has no problems outputting the closed captioning, just like DVD players are able to output closed captioning. I don't see how you can use a standard VGA card with TV out to accomplish the same thing, unless you have some special card that gives you scanline precise control over output.

[Durwood]

If our friends at SageTV are able to continue improving their support for the PVR350 hardware output, then perhaps we can have both solutions: (a) when hardware output is used, the CC can hopefully be included invisibly in scan line 21, and (b) if the customer prefers to turn on the CC so that it appears permanently in the resulting file, they can have that too.

(And in response to Lester, I too have a hard-of-hearing person in my family but we use a TV, not a computer monitor. And we all prefer to be able to turn the CC captioning on and off as needed rather than having it always on.)

[Narflex]

SHS, what do you know about CC capabilites for the PVR 250/350 cards?

[justme]

hehe I can't wait to hear what he has to say about this. I've been a royal pain in his butt about CC.

To anyone who reads this and doesn't know. Hauppauge is the one responsible for the PVR250/350 capabilities. SHS does not work for them, but he is the best ally a PVR card owner can have.

[Narflex]

DVD playback will have closed captions in it.....not what you asked for, but thought I'd mention it (and no, I don't mean subpicture, that's different, but it has that too)....and it's in the next release.

[salsbst]

Could the CC info be stored in a file separate from the MPEG file? Perhaps in that way, it wouldn't need to be an all-or-nothing decision when scheduling/recording.

[Durwood]

Originally posted by salsbst
Could the CC info be stored in a file separate from the MPEG file? Perhaps in that way, it wouldn't need to be an all-or-nothing decision when scheduling/recording.

Not sure why this would be a solution -- the idea is for the CC info to be "passed through" so that wherever the stream goes, even if it gets dumped onto video tape, it is still viewable on any TV you play that video stream on. (Again, as Tivo does.)

[salsbst]

So MPEG has CC in its spec? I didn't know that.

I thought the idea as to be able to decide at play time, rather than record time, whether or not you wanted the CC, and that, if you didn't have a separate file, then Sage would have to record the CC into the regular MPEG video stream.

EDIT: In rereading it seems like we're trying to solve different problems. I'm coming at this from a not-necessarily-using-a-TV perspective, in which case the CC needs to be in the regular video output stream, unless you don't want to watch the CC, in which case it needs not to be in the regulsr video output stream.

But I'm still confused as to whether or not the CC can be embedded in the MPEG without putting it in the regular video stream.

Thanks,
Stuart

[Durwood]

So MPEG has CC in its spec? I didn't know that.

I'm sure it doesn't. Its encoding is, I'm sure, an Analog thing. Something to do (according to what's been mentioned above) scanline 21, although I could have sworn I read somewhere that in MPEG it is encoded as part of the Audio stream, not the Video stream.

[fidget]

I am the proud owner of a TiVo so I can tell you of some of the "peculiarities" of CC. If you record a program at the highest fidelity you get all the CC text. As you reduce the quality of the recording, the "quality" of the CC text is recuded. At quality 3/4 (where 1/4 is the best), you no longer get any CC text.

--Jonathan