Closed Captions on SageTV9/Win10

[FriscoJohn]

I recently installed SageTV9 on my Lenovo G500 laptop (64bit Win10), added the LAV decoders and subscribed to Schedules Direct. All is working great with one exception: No closed captions. This was a pristine installation, i.e. there was no prior installation of SageTV on the machine.

Lack of closed captioning is a major problem for me as I'm heavily dependent on the captions. My primary Sage installation is SageTV7 on an Intel i5 desktop (Win10 64bit) which has been running for years and is displaying closed captions like a champ. (Although I had to install the ATI Mpeg2 decoder--see this thread for details: https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=61098 ).

Now for my question: Does anybody have SageTV9 on Win10 that displays closed captions? How did you do it? TIA.

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by FriscoJohn

I recently installed SageTV9 on my Lenovo G500 laptop (64bit Win10), added the LAV decoders and subscribed to Schedules Direct. All is working great with one exception: No closed captions. This was a pristine installation, i.e. there was no prior installation of SageTV on the machine.

Lack of closed captioning is a major problem for me as I'm heavily dependent on the captions. My primary Sage installation is SageTV7 on an Intel i5 desktop (Win10 64bit) which has been running for years and is displaying closed captions like a champ. (Although I had to install the ATI Mpeg2 decoder--see this thread for details: https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=61098 ).

Now for my question: Does anybody have SageTV9 on Win10 that displays closed captions? How did you do it? TIA.

The MPEG decoder that comes with a sage 7 supports closed captions. However, that decoder is not included in the open source Sage v9 due to licensing restrictions.

If you install Sage v7 first and then install Sage v9 over the top, you can keep the Sage MPEG decoder. But if you do a clean install of v9, you won't get it.

There have been a lot of posts about this topic, but I don't use CC myself so didn't pay close attention... I'm pretty sure that someone else found at least one other decoder that supported Closed Captions (might have been the NVidia or ATI codec?).

Of course this assumes you are recording from a source that supports closed captions in the first place. For example, the HDPVR does not support them, unless you turn them on in your cable box and then they will be part of the video, so you can't turn them off.

[FriscoJohn]

Thanks for the suggestion, Tiki. The problem with the Sagetv MPEG decoder is that it does a pretty terrible job of rendering captions, especially on marginal channels. The decoder I have used with great success is the ATI MPEG DECODER as mentioned in this thread.

https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=61098


If I installed SageTV9 over my working SageTV7 installation, it looks like I would just get the SageTV decoder which, as I say, does not produce usable CC, at least not on the channels I need. I don't think the ATI MPEG Decoder would transfer over since it isn't native to SageTV. I had to register it to DirectShow on Win7 to get it to work.

I was being lazy and hoping for a quick and easy answer from someone who had already figured this out. Looks like I may have to experiment and see if I can get the ATI decoder to install on Windows 10 or try to install one of the other decoders mentioned by Zogg on the above thread. From what I have been able to find on the web this may be challenging. I haven't been able to find a clear explanation of how to register a new decoder on Win10. Even after that is done there is no assurance that the new decoder will work with Win10's DirectShow which apparently has been extensively reworked.

If no one has a currently working set-up I will give it a shot and report back.

My other alternative is to keep my working SageTV7 set up and try to implement the Schedules Direct EPG on it. What I've seen on the forum about using SD with SageTV7 isn't encouraging and it looks like the plug-in to do this may not be actively maintained in the future. Thus I'm hoping for a SageTV9 solution.

Any more suggestions will certainly be appreciated as the CC issue is a very major one for the hearing impaired.

[MattHelm]

I do not have a working system, but I had one a long time ago. If I remember correctly, one of the things I had to do, was change the muxer on the server!?!?!?

This has been way to long to remember, but I do remember finding all the data on this forum.

Sorry I can't help more, but I may start looking into it also. Currently using extenders, but have clients I can fire up.

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by FriscoJohn

Thanks for the suggestion, Tiki. The problem with the Sagetv MPEG decoder is that it does a pretty terrible job of rendering captions, especially on marginal channels. The decoder I have used with great success is the ATI MPEG DECODER as mentioned in this thread.

https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=61098


If I installed SageTV9 over my working SageTV7 installation, it looks like I would just get the SageTV decoder which, as I say, does not produce usable CC, at least not on the channels I need. I don't think the ATI MPEG Decoder would transfer over since it isn't native to SageTV. I had to register it to DirectShow on Win7 to get it to work.

I was being lazy and hoping for a quick and easy answer from someone who had already figured this out. Looks like I may have to experiment and see if I can get the ATI decoder to install on Windows 10 or try to install one of the other decoders mentioned by Zogg on the above thread. From what I have been able to find on the web this may be challenging. I haven't been able to find a clear explanation of how to register a new decoder on Win10. Even after that is done there is no assurance that the new decoder will work with Win10's DirectShow which apparently has been extensively reworked.

If no one has a currently working set-up I will give it a shot and report back.

My other alternative is to keep my working SageTV7 set up and try to implement the Schedules Direct EPG on it. What I've seen on the forum about using SD with SageTV7 isn't encouraging and it looks like the plug-in to do this may not be actively maintained in the future. Thus I'm hoping for a SageTV9 solution.

Any more suggestions will certainly be appreciated as the CC issue is a very major one for the hearing impaired.

You're right that The SD plugin for Sage v7 is not actively maintained and the author is no longer a Sage user. So you really should upgrade to Sage v9.

Aside from (possibly) losing the Sage decoder, there is no difference in playback between Sage v7 and v9. So, if your ATI codec worked in v7 it should continue to work in v9 the same way. However, if you are moving to a new computer, I can't say for sure if you might run into issues because of a different version of Windows, or a different video card if something.

I can say for sure that the Microsoft codec that was included with Windows 7 (and worked very well for most people), is not included in Windows 10. But other than that and a bad Windows 10 update on March 14,2017, I haven't heard about any problems with using Sage on Windows 10.

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by FriscoJohn

I recently installed SageTV9 on my Lenovo G500 laptop (64bit Win10), added the LAV decoders and subscribed to Schedules Direct. All is working great with one exception: No closed captions. This was a pristine installation, i.e. there was no prior installation of SageTV on the machine.

Lack of closed captioning is a major problem for me as I'm heavily dependent on the captions. My primary Sage installation is SageTV7 on an Intel i5 desktop (Win10 64bit) which has been running for years and is displaying closed captions like a champ. (Although I had to install the ATI Mpeg2 decoder--see this thread for details: https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=61098 ).

Now for my question: Does anybody have SageTV9 on Win10 that displays closed captions? How did you do it? TIA.

I've been running Sage on Windows 7 for 10 years and have NEVER got captions to work. Do you have a link to a thread here that explains it simply if possible? Thanks

[Denali]

I currently have CC1 displaying using VMR9 and SageTV MPEG Video Decoder with DXVA for .MPEG recordings only. Have not found a working configuration for .TS recordings. EVR or DXVA off would not work. My system is a V9 over V7 via Sage.jar replacement. When I was using V7 I found the NVIDIA PureVideo Decoder v1.02.233 also worked for .MPEG recordings.

[FriscoJohn]

TVMaster:

The link in the first post in this thread describes how I got CC working reliably on SageTV7/Windows 7. When I later upgraded the OS to Win 10 the closed captioning still worked. The ATI decoder was the solution and still works like a champ today on my SageTV7/Windows10 setup.

My problem is that I did a clean install of SageTV9 on my laptop (running Win10) and it didn't have any of the decoders that I have been using on my Sage7/Win10 machine. I installed the LAV decoder package that has been recommended for SageTV9 and it now works fine except it doesn't show any CC.

I would install the ATI MPEG codec on my laptop but I can't find any info on how to install an individual codec in Windows10. If anyone can point me to a guide on how to do it I will certainly give it a try.


P.S. I realize that the SageTV Mpeg decoder works well for some but not for me. It worked on broadcast TV but not on the cable channels (Comcast SF). It appears that other people have had the same experience (see the referenced thread).

[FriscoJohn]

I followed the same procedure that I described in post #12 of this thread:

https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=61098

It worked! My earlier failure was due to forgetting to run Direct Show Filter Manager as an administrator (right click on its icon and select run as administrator). This time it installed atimpenc.dll without any fuss.

Opened SageTV9, went to Detailed Setup, scrolled to the Audio Video line, clicked on the installed MPEG decoder and it gave me the option of using the ATI MPEG decoder which I of course did.

Back to watching TV. Success--beautiful, non-glitchy CC on all channels, including the cable channels (assuming, of course, the program being carried has CC).

By the way, check post #14 on the above thread for a download source for atimpenc.dll.

Cheers.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

I've been running Sage on Windows 7 for 10 years and have NEVER got captions to work. Do you have a link to a thread here that explains it simply if possible? Thanks

CC is not going to work if you are using HD-PVR/Colossus as your sig states. For those, the only option if you need closed captioning is to turn it on on your cable boxes, so the rendered captions are simply part of the recorded video.