Those of you who want to use Cyberlink PDVD 8.0 decoders need to...

[mkanet]

For some reason, the only way to get Cyberlink mpeg2 decoders to be used by SageTV is putting the below statement in your properties file; otherwise, it wont show up as an option anymore as it used to in all previous versions of Cyberlink decoders:

videoframe/additional_video_filters=Cyberlink Video/SP Decoder (PDVD8)
videoframe/dvd_video_decoder_filter=Cyberlink Video/SP Decoder (PDVD8)

and... as before, if you want H.264 playback to work well, you'll need to add the below line as well:

videoframe/h264_video_decoder_filter=CyberLink H.264/AVC Decoder (PDVD8)

[ke6guj]

How good are the Cyberlink 8 decoders in displaying digital captioning from the HDHR?

[mkanet]

Jack, I can try for you if you tell me how to do it. Ive never tried not even with the old version.

Originally Posted by ke6guj

How good are the Cyberlink 8 decoders in displaying digital captioning from the HDHR?

[ke6guj]

let see, edit sage.properties or sageclient.properties and turn cc_option_enabled=true. That will let you turn on display of the CC in the options pop-up menu.

If you are using VMR9, that should be all you need to do. If using OVerlay, you would need to turn OVerlay Color Keying to off in Detailed Setup.

That should do it, as long as CC is captured in the digital stream, you should have it. And looking at your tuner setup, all should be capturing the incoming stream without too much issue.

What we are looking for is perfectly displayed CC (no jibberish) from the Broadcast Digital Locals, and even more we can get it from the other digital channels.

[mkanet]

Sure.. Ill try it. Im guessing it will start displaying when I press mute? Is there another way to turn it on and off with the remote?

Originally Posted by ke6guj

let see, edit sage.properties or sageclient.properties and turn cc_option_enabled=true. That will let you turn on display of the CC in the options pop-up menu.

If you are using VMR9, that should be all you need to do. If using OVerlay, you would need to turn OVerlay Color Keying to off in Detailed Setup.

That should do it, as long as CC is captured in the digital stream, you should have it. And looking at your tuner setup, all should be capturing the incoming stream without too much issue.

What we are looking for is perfectly displayed CC (no jibberish) from the Broadcast Digital Locals, and even more we can get it from the other digital channels.

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by mkanet

Sure.. Ill try it. Im guessing it will start displaying when I press mute? Is there another way to turn it on and off with the remote?

the normal way to turn CC on is to bring up the options menu during playback and change the Captions(OFF) to (CC1).

If you install JREkiwi's Closed Caption Playback Plugin, you can add the capability to Auto-CC-on-mute, or assign a Custom button to turn on/off CC via the remote.

One thing to try would be to confirm that you actually do have CC in the digital recordings by running a recording through ccextractor, http://ccextractor.sourceforge.net/ , and extracting the CC into an .srt file and opening it with notepad and see if you see CC data.

[mkanet]

I tried using CC extractor. I'm not sure if I had the right syntax.. but I just typed:

ccextractorwin.exe movie.mpg -o test.txt

The result was garbage and some words referring to the name of the show.

If ccextractor doesnt show an closed captions (provided I'm even doing it right) then it doesnt look like the PDVD decoder even has a chance.

I tried this with both my HDHomerun and R5000.

Maybe I didnt do ccextractor right?

Originally Posted by ke6guj

the normal way to turn CC on is to bring up the options menu during playback and change the Captions(OFF) to (CC1).

If you install JREkiwi's Closed Caption Playback Plugin, you can add the capability to Auto-CC-on-mute, or assign a Custom button to turn on/off CC via the remote.

One thing to try would be to confirm that you actually do have CC in the digital recordings by running a recording through ccextractor, http://ccextractor.sourceforge.net/ , and extracting the CC into an .srt file and opening it with notepad and see if you see CC data.

[ke6guj]

Looks like the syntax was wrong.

Try ccextractorwin.exe -srt movie.mpg . that will create an .srt file named movie_1.srt that you can open in notepad to see if there is any captioning. I think your syntax created a binary dump, thats why its unreadable.

Yup, if ccextractor can't find any captioning, then the decoder doesn't have a chance.

[mkanet]

Jack, I can confirm that all channels with CC data get displayed correctly using via HDHomeRun via clean QAM and Hauppauge OTA ATSC as well. Premium channels aren't displaying CC (ie HBO, SHO, and On Demand movies) via my R5000s.

At first I was having the video slow down when seeing CC. But now everything works very smootly!

Is there a way to make the font smaller?

Thanks for helping me get CC setup perfectly!

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by mkanet

Jack, I can confirm that all channels with CC data get displayed correctly using via HDHomeRun via clean QAM and Hauppauge OTA ATSC as well. Premium channels aren't displaying CC (ie HBO, SHO, and On Demand movies) via my R5000s.

cool that the PowerDVD8 decoders are displaying perfect captions when it does do captions. V7 captions were all garbled.

Did you check to see if the R5000 recordings do have CC embedded in them with ccextractorwin?

Is there a way to make the font smaller?

NOt that I know of. The captions are pretty much hard coded from the original embedded captioning. There are some adjustments available in JREkiwi's caption playback plugin, but they are mainly for displaying .smi captions. I primarily use the plugin to auto-CC-on-mute and to toggle CC via the remote.

Thanks for helping me get CC setup perfectly!

Thank you as well for working with me to see if V8 was better than V7. Now I need to see about trying V8 and see if I like it better than Purevideo.

[mkanet]

Jack, I just tried again. I'm also using the CC import you suggested. For all my premium channels movies, like HBO, SHO.. via R5000, CC is working about 80%. Sometimes a few letters are missing, and sometimes characters that shouldn't be there; but, I wouldnt call it garbled text.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
190
00:10:52,285 --> 00:10:55,721
Stop that.
Stop being the hero.
Go to bed.

191
00:10:55,722 --> 00:10:58,857
I got it. Walk away. Go.

192
00:10:58,858 --> 00:10:59,892
I got it.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

[ke6guj]

I just DL'd the V8 demo and am playing with it now. It does looks to do the digital captioning better than it did. However, it only works on HDHR reocordings and not my firewired STB recordings.

YOur pic shows what I called garbled captioning. PowerDVD7 was like that for all recordings before, but V8 looks to be better. I'll have to do some testing to see how much better it is, and compare it to the WInDVD decoders as well.

[mkanet]

Sounds like we're having consist results. Do you see any picture quality differences in PowerDVD 8 verses all other decoders? I'm just guessing that its not going to make any difference since any VMR9 hardware accellerated decoder will display video and interlace the same way.

Originally Posted by ke6guj

I just DL'd the V8 demo and am playing with it now. It does looks to do the digital captioning better than it did. However, it only works on HDHR reocordings and not my firewired STB recordings.

YOur pic shows what I called garbled captioning. PowerDVD7 was like that for all recordings before, but V8 looks to be better. I'll have to do some testing to see how much better it is, and compare it to the WInDVD decoders as well.

[HawgGuy]

Any obvious benefit to PDVD8 vs PDVD7 ?

Have you tried the h.264 decoder, or know if it has been changed?

I rely on the h.264 decoder extensively as it seems to be the only reliable decoder with SageTV for playback of r5000-hd h.264 streams.

[mkanet]

Nothing as far as I can tell. It handles closed captions better. Some people claim that the picture quality is better; however, I doubt that. If you don't have any issues, I definitely wouldnt upgrade.

Originally Posted by HawgGuy

Any obvious benefit to PDVD8 vs PDVD7 ?

Have you tried the h.264 decoder, or know if it has been changed?

I rely on the h.264 decoder extensively as it seems to be the only reliable decoder with SageTV for playback of r5000-hd h.264 streams.

[HawgGuy]

Originally Posted by mkanet

F

videoframe/additional_video_filters=Cyberlink Video/SP Decoder (PDVD8)
videoframe/dvd_video_decoder_filter=Cyberlink Video/SP Decoder (PDVD8)

Just got PDVD8 - above config gives playback error when I try to use it for TV, have not tried for DVD yet.

[mkanet]

Make sure you dont have a type... like having a space, or not a space when you shouldn't. That happens if you dont have it spelled right.

Originally Posted by HawgGuy

Just got PDVD8 - above config gives playback error when I try to use it for TV, have not tried for DVD yet.

[tuxsf]

Hey, this is an interesting thread! Let me jump in and ask some questions! It sounds like all of you are using various Windows decoders (Cyberlink, PowerDVD, WinDVD) to get closed captioning since the built-in SageTV decoder doesn't display closed captions. How well are closed captions handled by SageTV if the platform is Linux instead of Windows? Linux has at least a couple of decoders (mplayer & xine) that can display closed captions - can SageTV use either of these decoders? Do both analog and digital captions work well on Linux?
- John

[ke6guj]

Unforunately, I have no experiance with Linux and Sage, so I can't help you with that.

Plus, you have to be able to get the captions embedded into the recording.

DIgital Tuners that just record the incoming digital stream via OTA, QAM, R5000HD, or Firewire have the captions embedded from the broadcaster, so those should all set from the recording side, you just ahve to be able to display them then, which can be difficult with the decoders.

Analog tuners must manually embedd the captions into the recording via the CCinDVD method. AFAIK, only the Hauppauge tuners can do this with a CCinDVD-equipped driver. I don't know if the linux drivers do CCinDVD. Once the recordings have hte CC embedded, displaying them in Windows is fairly easy, just need a DVD decoder and you are pretty much set.

[bcjenkins]

Originally Posted by tuxsf

Hey, this is an interesting thread! Let me jump in and ask some questions! It sounds like all of you are using various Windows decoders (Cyberlink, PowerDVD, WinDVD) to get closed captioning since the built-in SageTV decoder doesn't display closed captions. How well are closed captions handled by SageTV if the platform is Linux instead of Windows? Linux has at least a couple of decoders (mplayer & xine) that can display closed captions - can SageTV use either of these decoders? Do both analog and digital captions work well on Linux?
- John

Hi John,

SageTV uses ffmpeg, source avail upon request, for all playback in Linux. If you can do it in ffmpeg svn, it should be trivial to add support to the SageTV version. The foo that SageTV does is required though, so it has to include their code.

B