Closed Captions Mysteriously Appeared

[werneral]

I've searched high and low for an answer to this but have had no luck.

Closed captioning has some how been turned on in my Sage TV install 9vs.1.1.3.67) I can not find a means of turning it off (or on) and this appears to have happened as a result of Sage freezing up while trying to fast forward through trailers at the beginning of a DVD. Very bizarre, but also infuriating to have to watch all the text jump around on the screen. I've looked in and played around with the Sage file and can only find reference to cc options which is false. Tried True but it makes no difference.

If anyone has a clue as to how to get rid of the CC I'd appreciate it.

[ke6guj]

With Sage shut down, chage the cc options to true. That will give you a CC options menu in the Options pop-up during playback. There you should be able to set CC to off.

[werneral]

That appears to have solved my problem. Thanks much!

[mike1961]

Interesting - I tried that on my SageClient and the captions options now shows up in the Options menu but I can't toggle it to ON. Does it only work with DVD's or can it work with TV shows also because I tried several shows that Sage recorded and I can't get the Captions to toggle to ON. It just stays in the OFF mode and it also doesn't seem to work with mpeg4 files encoded with Nero.

Thanks,
Mike

Originally Posted by ke6guj

With Sage shut down, chage the cc options to true. That will give you a CC options menu in the Options pop-up during playback. There you should be able to set CC to off.

[ke6guj]

what decoder are you using on the client? It has to be a DVD decoder, the Sage decoder won't work.

The captions only work for embedded captions in mpeg2 files, not anything else. You could try to extract the captions into an .smi file and use JREkiwi's closed caption import, http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=23752 , that will play the .smi captions.


edit: And I'm not sure what tuner cards you are using, but the embedded captions will only work if you have a hauppauge PVR 150, 250, 350, and 500 (it may also work for some of the newer HVR cards in analog recordings, but I dunno for sure).

[mike1961]

I have the NVidia tuner cards. Maybe it's that or maybe I need to change the setting on the server as well as the client.

Thanks,
Mike

[ke6guj]

Nope, you can't record embedded CC with the nVidia card. nVidia would need to write CCinDVD support into their drivers. And with it being a discontinued card, I don't think I'd hold my breath waiting on CCinDVD support.

[mike1961]

Do you have any recommendations for really good cards that support closed captions? The nVidia DualTV card seems to have much better video quality than the Hauppauge cards.

Thanks,
Mike

[ke6guj]

Unfortunately if you want CC you have to use a Hauppauge card, either the 150, 250, 350, or 500. I have 2 PVR-500's and a 150. To me the quality is good enough. I haven't seen a DualTV recording to see how much better it would be.

There was a major problem with some PVR-500's having bad tuners, but that has been fixed.

You other option is if you are capturing digital via QAM or OTA, those recordings have CC in them as well. It can't be displayed by Sage, but it can be extracted via ccextractor and then JREkiwi's import can play the extracted captions.

[Mary H]

Just in the last 2 days, strange scrambled captions have mysteriously appeared in my SageTV recordings with the HDHomerun. I don't play files back from Sage, but with ZoomPlayer on another computer. So why are the closed captions suddenly appearing in my recordings, and how can I get rid of them? I looked through the Sage.properties file, but I don't see anything about CC.

[ke6guj]

OK, captions are embedded in the digital stream that the HDHR captures. There aren't any sage.properties settings to adjust to stop the captions from being captured.

Since you aren't using Sage for playback, there aren't any settings that help you on the display side either. You need to look at the zoom player settings to see if you can turn on/off captions in that software. One possibility would be to change directdraw decoders if zoomplayer uses them. For instance, with the PowerDVD and WinDVD decoders, I do get some digital captioning display, but it isn't accurate, either I only get captions on some digital channels or I get scrambled captions on all digital channels. With the nVIdia Purevideo decoder, I don't get any digital caption displayed at all.

[Mary H]

Thanks for the reply! Since posting, I've discovered that if I switch back to the overlay renderer, the captions don't appear. I just got a new 1080p TV, and VMR9 looks better... but if this is the only way to avoid those ugly captions, so be it.

[ke6guj]

Its cool that you got something to work, but I'd look into fixing the main problem instead of using the overlay bandaid if it doesn't look as good as VMR9.

Does zoom player use the directdraw filters or does it have its own build-in decoders?

Are you using the PowerDVD or WinDVD MPEG decoder?

[ugh]

I'm getting the mysterious CC alos. Adding the CC option to the properties file doesn't get rid of it. I actually get 2 CC if I set the menu option for CC to true. The Caption STVI didn't change anything either.

I'm using Sage 6.5.9 under Vista. Looks like it is only happening on HD recordings from my PVR-1600.

The only thing that makes them go away is switching to Overlay. I'd prefer to use EVR.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Jim

[Ryokurin]

If you use ffdshow and have the subtitle option enabled it will show captions on sd content by default. Possibly on HD but I haven't seen it on my system. Worth checking if you use it for post processing or your mpeg-2 decoder outright.

[ugh]

You rock! Wasn't ffdshow. But I do have autoGK which installed VOBsub... Hide the subtitles and presto! I never noticed the icon in the system tray because I usually have Sage full screen.

Thanks for the help!

[Toddupton]

Thanks UGH vobsub was my problem too!