Subtitles in Recorded Video?

[bmwjohnno]

Hi. I have purchased and installed SageTV on a PC with XP Prof 2 (a Fusion HDTV twin HD tuner - I think it's a DVICO chip) and am happy with most SageTV features, it records on time and follows the series whenever it appears on TV. The quality of the recordings are good HD when replayed. The HDTV tuner I use supports subtitles.

Now this is where the confusion starts. Because the SageTV forums tend to be fragmented I have turned up lots of references to subtitles but in many different contexts and situations. SageTV is also bionic, part corporate product and part public development. A full explanation of whether the media player can support standard inbuilt subtitles (not text file appendages) or not, whether the file that is recorded contains them - and when that support will be forthcoming. This would at least put SageTV on a competitive footing with other commercial TV recorders.

If this question has been answered then it simply demonstrates the difficulty in accessing simple answers for users' needs.

[merneric]

I was very close to posting the same questions myself, as I pretty confused on this topic as well. The best sources for info (that I have been able to find) seem to be in these threads:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=23752

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=41019

It would be nice if someone could put together a nice How-To Guide in one place though. If I ever get it figured out, and if no one else has done it, I might give it a shot.

[Tiki]

The simplest answer is that subtitles have never been fully supported natively by SageTV.

There has been an unsupported feature to allow closed caption support with certain video cards, but I think you needed to modify a registry entry to enable it and Sage treated it as an unsupported feature. I beleive there is also an add-on available on these forums that allows display of certain types of sub-titles.

The latest Beta relases of Sage do support subtitles, so you can expect that the next official release of Sage will support them. Sage never publishes a release schedule, but if I had to guess, I would expect they will be putting out a new release in the next month or so.

Apparently subtitles are quite complicated, which is probably why Sage waited so long to support them. For example, they are handled differently for broadcast television then for DVD's. Also, some are text-only, while others are graphical. To make matters worse, there are many different file formats for storing video (mpg, mp4, mkv, avi, etc.) and the captions can either be stored inside of the video file or as a separate file.

From what I can tell by reading these forums, Sage is putting a real effort into supporting many different types of subtitles, but it may take them a while to get it working correctly for every type of file and they may not work the same for every type of playback device (SageTV Client, Placeshifter, HD100, HD200).

Once they are supported in a released version of Sage, I would expect that they will be fully documented in the Sage Manual.