Very Weird

[wbarber69]

I've been using sagetv now for a while, over 2 years now. I have never had closed captioning working nor did I ever try to get them working right, since I have pvr 150s and pvr 500s and its next to impossible to get them working anyway (or so I thought). I was having some issues with 6.2.5 so I went back to 6.1.9 and now out of the blue there are closed captions on every one of my recordings that show up now and some from the past. Its just plain weird

[ke6guj]

In December 2006, I found out that the newer driver releases for the PVR-150 and 500 had CC support. All it requires is to install a 24201+ (dated 7-06) driver, set the cc_option to true, and use a DVD decoder, thats it.

So, at some time in the last year, it appears that you updated the drivers for the 150 and 500 and didn't realize that it was capturing the CC for you.

[wbarber69]

ok my next question is does it affect the captions playback if I transcode

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by wbarber69

ok my next question is does it affect the captions playback if I transcode

Oh yah, most definitely. If you transcode, the CC will be destroyed in the video. Teh solution is to extract the CC to an .smi file before you transcode. If you have the .smi file, you can use JREkiwi's CC plugin, http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=23752 , to display the .smi files.

And you can use Dirmon2 to run mpg2srt on the original MPEG to extract the CC to an .smi file.

[wbarber69]

how the h#!! do you rip text out of a mpg is there some special program for extracting CC or would I have to download the smi files off the internet or something

[ke6guj]

You can use mpg2srt or ccextractor to extract the CC in a normal analog MPEG file. ccextractor, http://ccextractor.sourceforge.net , will also extract CC out of a digitally captured recording.

both mpg2srt and ccextracotr are dos programs and can be scripted to be run with Dirmon2.

[wbarber69]

sounds good but I'm having trouble setting up dirmon2 to use ccextractor

[ke6guj]

I got dirmon2 to run ccextractor, but it will continually re-run ccextractor over the same files, since ccextractor doesn't just name the file recordingfile-12345-0.smi to match recordingfile-12345-0.mpg, it puts in a _1 after the -0, so dirmon2's rules don't seem to match the _1.smi to the original mpg.

Unless you are doing any digital captures, you could probably use mpg2srt with no issues.