Closed Captions on DVD-R 's ?

[TryingToBeSage]

Hello Everyone,

I have not purchased SageTV yet but I have the latest trial version installed on my system, and I have two Hauppauge WinTV-PVR250 tuner cards in my pc.

I would like to be able to record TV including the Closed Captions and burn the recorded programs onto DVD-R 's with the closed captions included. I will not be watching television on my pc, instead I will be taking the burned dvd-r 's to play on my dvd player attached to my television set.

So far I cannot get the closed captions to display on my pc monitor.
I seem to be only be able to playback a recording in "Overlay" not "VMR9".
Is this the problem ?

Also, I do not know how to burn the recording to DVD-R.
Should I use Nero or Should I download and use the plug-in ?

For those of you who are getting the closed captions recorded on your pc 's with your tuner cards, if you burn a dvd, are the captions visible when you play back that dvd on a standalone dvd player connected to a television set ?

Thanks for your help.

[TechBill]

There 3 way to do it.

First way is which I first started doing is to transcode the mpeg recorded by SageTV using mplayer and a variable to burn the Closed Caption into the video itself so it recorded as Open Caption then burn it to DVD-R this way it can be play back on any mpeg player without needing to find a player that can or support CC or decode CC.

Second way is that I use the first method for a while until I finally PM evilpenguin and ask him if he would include a CC to OC support in his Video Tool plugin and he did included it in his later editor tool versions. Now I use the SageMC evilpenguin video tool and just select to use subtitle option and his video tool will add the variable needed to burn the CC into the video. However you will need to install SageMC then his plugin .. You can read more about it at http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=28006

And the third way is to just burn the SageTV recorded mpeg into DVD-r and use a player that can read the CC imbedded in the mpeg and play it back as a subtitle and mplayer is the player that could do it. I ask the author who wrote a Windows front-end mplayer "Smplayer" to provide a CC toggle support and he added it in his latest version. You can download the GUI and Mplayer at his website "SMplayer" http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/


Of course you would need to be using a decoder that support CC so you will need to have PowerDVD7 or above etc. Be sure to use the latest RC mplayer because I asked the developer to add a support for scrolling CC like Live show or taped show CC which scrolls on the bottom instead static pop up CC and the RC version mplayer supports it now.

Feel free to PM me any question you may have!
Bill

[TryingToBeSage]

Hi TechBill, Thank you for your reply. I am trying to understand it. Please forgive my inexperience. This is all very new to me. I have no objection to pm you, but I think there may be other folk who are newbies like me so I'll start out replying here.

Originally Posted by TechBill

There 3 way to do it.

First way is which I first started doing is to transcode the mpeg recorded by SageTV using mplayer and a variable to burn the Closed Caption into the video itself so it recorded as Open Caption then burn it to DVD-R this way it can be play back on any mpeg player without needing to find a player that can or support CC or decode CC.

Will my set top dvd player for my television play "Open Captions"?
What is the variable to set and what do I set it to?

Originally Posted by TechBill

Second way is that I use the first method for a while until I finally PM evilpenguin and ask him if he would include a CC to OC support in his Video Tool plugin and he did included it in his later editor tool versions. Now I use the SageMC evilpenguin video tool and just select to use subtitle option and his video tool will add the variable needed to burn the CC into the video. However you will need to install SageMC then his plugin .. You can read more about it at http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=28006

I read the post at the link you referenced.
I understood some of it but not much.
One thing it referred to was a plugin for cc playback on the pc.
It is at this url.
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/down...do=file&id=169

Do I need that plugin also or does it have nothing to do with getting the closed caption info into a dvd-r for playback on my set top dvd player at my television?

Originally Posted by TechBill

And the third way is to just burn the SageTV recorded mpeg into DVD-r and use a player that can read the CC imbedded in the mpeg and play it back as a subtitle and mplayer is the player that could do it. I ask the author who wrote a Windows front-end mplayer "Smplayer" to provide a CC toggle support and he added it in his latest version. You can download the GUI and Mplayer at his website "SMplayer" http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/

This sounds like a method for playing back on my pc. Maybe I do not understand this properly.
I am not watching the programs I record on my pc, I want to burn them to dvd-r to playback with captions on my television and set top dvd player.

Originally Posted by TechBill

Of course you would need to be using a decoder that support CC so you will need to have PowerDVD7 or above etc. Be sure to use the latest RC mplayer because I asked the developer to add a support for scrolling CC like Live show or taped show CC which scrolls on the bottom instead static pop up CC and the RC version mplayer supports it now.

Feel free to PM me any question you may have!
Bill

I have PowerDVD 5 and I am using Windows XP as the OS. PowerDVD 5 claims to support Closed Captions. Is its claim for support inaccurate?
What is RC mplayer?

Sorry to need so much help. Thanks in advance.

[TechBill]

Originally Posted by TryingToBeSage

Hi TechBill, Thank you for your reply. I am trying to understand it. Please forgive my inexperience. This is all very new to me. I have no objection to pm you, but I think there may be other folk who are newbies like me so I'll start out replying here.



Will my set top dvd player for my television play "Open Captions"?
What is the variable to set and what do I set it to?

Open caption is that the caption is visable all the time and burnt into the video itself. You cannot turn it "off" since it part of the video now. So yes any dvd player should be able to play open caption since it playing the video with caption already on it.

Closed Caption is a line21 code imbedded into the video stream but a decoder need to be able to detect that line21 and decode it out before it overlay the captions onto the video. TV set is usally the ones that does the decoding. There is a DVD upconvert player that decodes CC and overlay it on video before sending it thur the HDMI ouput.


When you transcode a video into another format for smaller size or better resolution etc. You can set mencoder to decode the closed caption and burn it into the video itself so it become an open caption however you will have to transcode all your recorded show so it will decode the closed caption into open caption and burn it into the video. Then you would take the result mpeg and burn it to a dvd-r. The string you would use with mencoder to decode it while it transcode are something like this "-subcc -subfont-text-scale 2.3" actually you use the same string to play the mpeg back with closed caption decoded on video in mplayer too.

I read the post at the link you referenced.
I understood some of it but not much.
One thing it referred to was a plugin for cc playback on the pc.
It is at this url.
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/down...do=file&id=169

Do I need that plugin also or does it have nothing to do with getting the closed caption info into a dvd-r for playback on my set top dvd player at my television?

No you do not need to get this plugin. It was for your reference. Like I explained earlier you would need to download a mencoder and transcode the video to have closed caption burnt into the video as an open caption but the mencoder is a text based program which mean you have to open a command prompt and enter the commands with the proper strings to transcode videos. What this plugin does is it uses mencoder to transcode but it offer a GUI allowing you to point and click in SageTV to transcode videos.

This sounds like a method for playing back on my pc. Maybe I do not understand this properly.
I am not watching the programs I record on my pc, I want to burn them to dvd-r to playback with captions on my television and set top dvd player.

Yes Mplayer is for playback on PCs or Laptops. It have nothing to do with set top dvd players .

I have PowerDVD 5 and I am using Windows XP as the OS. PowerDVD 5 claims to support Closed Captions. Is its claim for support inaccurate?
What is RC mplayer?

Sorry to need so much help. Thanks in advance.

I tried PowerDVD5 and couldn't get Closed Caption working on it so I purchased PowerDVD7 and it worked for me but I had the OEM version of PowerDVD5 which came with the Dell laptop so it probably stripped down version and I would test it with PowerDVD5 to see if the closed caption is working and displayed while playing back from a DVD disc in your PC DVD player.

Mplayer developer offer different mplayer versions. One is stable and other is RC, RC stands for release candiate. Stable version is no longer being developed unless it a security patch or a bad bug patch etc while the RC version is being developed and improved on daily that it have all the latest support developed into it. So if you wanted to play back a recorded mpeg that have the scrolling closed caption ie "Live News" or some daytime taped shows like People's Court etc then you would need to download the latest Mplayer RC to playback since the stable version does not support scrolling Closed Caption.





One other thing I forgot that you can do.

You can use a program called ccextractor.exe and run it on the SageTV recorded mpeg file that it will create a subtitle file from reading the closed caption in the mpeg then you can burn the mpeg and the subtitle file onto the DVD-r and your set top dvd player should be able to detect a subtitle file is avaliable and offer you the option to toggle the subtitle on or off.

You can even add an application called dirmon on your SageTV box and configure it to run ccextractor after the recording is done so a subtitle file is always created each time it finish recording a show.

It not caption but caption convert into subtitle and probably be the best and easiest way for you to use. Transcoding a video take a long time and ccextractor take only a few minutes to create a subtitle file.

Here the website to the ccextractor http://ccextractor.sourceforge.net/ I just noticed that the author recently updated it and offer a Windows GUI for it now.


Bill

[TryingToBeSage]

TechBill, Thanks for all the information and education.

I too have PowerDVD 5 OEM that I got with my DVD-R/W drives.
Apparently, Cyberlink did leave out the Closed Caption decoder in the OEM version.

I downloaded and installed a trial version of PowerDVD 8.
There were no downloadable earlier versions available.

I tried playing the tv programs recorded with version 5, but still no closed captions.
Then I tried watching live tv and the closed captions appeared. Hurray !!!

Next I tried recording tv programs and playing them back on the pc.
Closed Captions display. Hurray !!!

Next I used Nero Vision version 8 to burn the .mpg files from the Video directory in SageTV into DVD-R. I take the DVD-R over to my tv set and pop the disc into the set top dvd player. Disc plays and Closed Captions appear. Hurray !!!

Next I try upping the recording quality setting from DVD Standard Play to Maximum quality. No Closed Captions appear. Not on live tv. Not on playback of recordings. Not on recordings burned to DVD-R. :-(

There is a small improvement in the sharpness when using Maximum versus DVD Standard Play, but I will have to forego it in order to get my Closed Captions. It is probably just as well since you can only fit 1:15 Hrs. onto a standard dvd-r at Maximum quality and 1 Hr. of program would use over 5 Gb. of hard disk space on my pc.

DVD Standard Play looks at least as good as VHS SLP. Though not quite as good as my beloved LiteOn Hard Disk Recorder set at DVD SP, but dvd-r discs burn much faster in my pc's Pioneer 16X DVD-RW than the 4.5X burn speed of the LiteOn Hard Disk recorder's dvd drive.

If there is something particularly good on tv I may try to use Maximum Quality and ccextractor to turn the closed captions into subtitles. I like to be able to turn the text off if it obstructs something critical in the scene that I want to see on rewind->replay.

Thank you again for all of your help, information, and patience.

Regards.