Closed captioning. Who's to blame, drivers or SAGETV?

[mirceaion]

I use a Hauppauge PVR 500MCE on Media Center 2005.

I read and read many posts on this forum saying that on 250-230 versions of the Hauppauge tuner you can get CC in some obscure and complicated way, like it is a matter of hardware or drivers.

1. Tell me then how Media Center is able to display CC in the same exact hardware-software-driver configuration? The only problem is it's missing letters and it's far from being perfect.
2. Tell me how ChrisTV displays perfect CC? How? This tells me that there's nothing wrong with the hardware and the drivers Hauppauge offers with it. I believe it's just indolence.

Make me understand!

Don't get me wrong. I like it to a certain extent, its design and wealth of settings (there's room for more optionsand maybe better or at least explained). It's far from being perfect though and not having CC is inexcusable.

Why still asking for customer feedback to improve the software when it's at version 5 and no CC which I think everyone who bought a licence would like to have more or less.

You want to make it better. Start with CC. I'm asking one more time.

Regards.

[AWS]

....subscribing to this thread....

for the longest time I have CC support in SageTV and I was very careful to not mess it up. Well, somehow I did. Now I don't get anything. I'm not sure when that happened because I use CC every blue moon. It may have been the 5.0.4 update or who knows when. But either way, it's not working for me anymore.

dunno why.

AWS

[rickgillyon]

Originally Posted by mirceaion

CC which I think everyone who bought a licence would like to have more or less.

This is a very big assumption!
I sympathise with what you're saying and agree it should be present, but personally I don't give a monkey's about CC, have never used it and not likely to unless I develop hearing difficulties...I suspect a large proportion of licence-holders feel the same.

[hemicuda]

My $0.001... I'm of the mindset that if it's there, I want to at least have the *option* to use it. Is it by chance passed through the datastream so that a CC-enabled TV will display it via its own hardware?

[blade]

Originally Posted by mirceaion

1. Tell me then how Media Center is able to display CC in the same exact hardware-software-driver configuration? The only problem is it's missing letters and it's far from being perfect.
2. Tell me how ChrisTV displays perfect CC? How? This tells me that there's nothing wrong with the hardware and the drivers Hauppauge offers with it. I believe it's just indolence.

Make me understand!

Don't get me wrong. I like it to a certain extent, its design and wealth of settings (there's room for more optionsand maybe better or at least explained). It's far from being perfect though and not having CC is inexcusable.

Why still asking for customer feedback to improve the software when it's at version 5 and no CC which I think everyone who bought a licence would like to have more or less.

You want to make it better. Start with CC. I'm asking one more time.

Regards.

The PVR150/500 doesn't support encoding the CC data into the mpg. Apparently the new drivers support CC in real liveTV, but the cards still can't encode that data.

MCE is using some kind of work around that as you've seen isn't exactly accurate.

I don't know much about chrisTV, but according to what chris himself said here it's not possible to record the CC with his software either. He's talking about another card, but it seems if it was possible with other cards he'd have mentioned it. Even liveTV is recorded in Sage so I wouldn't think they could implement the same type of CC support chris has for liveTV.

[blade]

Originally Posted by hemicuda

Is it by chance passed through the datastream so that a CC-enabled TV will display it via its own hardware?

No that's the problem. The 150/500 doesn't support encoding it into the mpg.

[blade]

Originally Posted by rickgillyon

This is a very big assumption!
I sympathise with what you're saying and agree it should be present, but personally I don't give a monkey's about CC, have never used it and not likely to unless I develop hearing difficulties...I suspect a large proportion of licence-holders feel the same.

Same here.

[KarylFStein]

I'd be happy if I could just get rid of the white bars on the top of the picture. I understand that is the CC data. Yes, I know you can stretch your picture, but on some of the OTA HDTV pictures, the lines go down pretty far. If decoding the CC means getting rid of the white bars, I'm all for it!

[oblique]

Originally Posted by blade

The PVR150/500 doesn't support encoding the CC data into the mpg.

Hmm, this isn't true, at least with the PVR-150.

I've got several PVR-150s, and I know for a fact that the Linux open source ivtv drivers (not sure about Win32) support Closed Captioning.

However, different revisions of the PVR-150 have different chipset revisions, so CC decoding does not work in all cards.

I have one PVR-150 that works like a champ, encoding CC data into captured MPEGs without problem. The other card didn't decode CC at all, but after a few hours debugging the driver source code, I was able to identify/fix a bug that allowed CC data to be captured. However, this results in the audio in the captured MPEG being stuttery and incorrect.

So in closing, based on my experience with this hardware:

Some PVR-150 cards can capture/encode CC data properly (even with the open source drivers), others cannot. This seems to be due to chipset differences between revisions of the card.

Note: I haven't tried to get CC working within SageTV. I'm just referring to the capabilities of the card itself, and the available open source Linux drivers.

[blade]

Originally Posted by oblique

I have one PVR-150 that works like a champ, encoding CC data into captured MPEGs without problem. The other card didn't decode CC at all, but after a few hours debugging the driver source code, I was able to identify/fix a bug that allowed CC data to be captured. However, this results in the audio in the captured MPEG being stuttery and incorrect.

So you were able to record the show and watch it back later with the CC available on the one working tuner?

From your experience it seems that there is good reason why CC isn't supported with the 150/500.

[hemicuda]

what about the 350 cards?

[mayamaniac]

technically, how does CC work exactly? I read about it here but still unsure how it actually works. If the data is there on the upper part of the video, then why can't SageTV decode it?

[src666]

Originally Posted by mayamaniac

technically, how does CC work exactly? I read about it here but still unsure how it actually works. If the data is there on the upper part of the video, then why can't SageTV decode it?

The CC signal comes into the capture card with the TV signal. The capture card then takes the TV signal and converts it to MPEG2 - at this point, some capture cards (150, 500) do not encode the CC part of the TV signal - they just drop it (or otherwise munge it). The end result is that the CC data isn't passed through in the MPEG file that comes out.

[mayamaniac]

so for cards that do encode the CC data into the mpeg2, then SageTV should be able to decode them?

[dblaine2]

Originally Posted by hemicuda

what about the 350 cards?

Yes 350 cards support CC.

[hemicuda]

I should have been more specific... does the 350 encode CC to the mpg file? If so I'll try to make it the default card for recording in case someting comes down the pipe to make the feature work/stable.

[Opus4]

Appendix K of the manual (p. 253 for v5) talks about using the PVR-250 and PVR-350 for CC.

- Andy

[hemicuda]

And so it is. I'd read this before, but didn't have much luck 1st time around.

Guess I'll play around w/ the render settings as the best I've gotten is a block of green hashes at the bottom of the screen. But first to make sure I have the 350 as the highest merit in the list.