cheap PCMCIA or USB TV-tuner with CC

[sub]

If they're not imbedding the CC in the MPEG2 file then the question is...why wouldn't they? Don't they still do that with the PVR250?

because this is now considered the "old way of doing things" which no longer meets their needs. See comment on MCE below.

Please don't read this as me bashing GB-PVR in any way.

Dont worry, I'm not taking it that way. Its difficult for many people to understand what is happening with CC, and why they're not seeing it in their favourite applications, so I wanted to get a bit of knowledge out there.

Is every piece of video related software going to have to do it or can't Hauppauge just do something a little more standard?

They reason they made this change, or rather Conexant who manufacture the chipsets and reference driver on which the Hauppauge drivers are based, is because a couple of years back (but after PVR250/350 existed) Microsoft specified that the VBI should be passed as a separate stream for compliance for their upcoming MCE platform. This carries a lot of weight, so this is now what industry is doing.

[Pilot]

So...I should be writing Bill and Linda Gates instead, asking them why they're screwing up Closed Captioning for everyone?

Okay, okay...so I'm talking out of my posterior. Thank you for not directly telling me that. After reading the US law about CC (which is one of the very few that are in plain English), I'm surprised that anyone (including Microsoft) would risk messing with CC in any way shape or form. To change a standard like that seems a little politically risky to me -- Billy doesn't want the deaf community coming down on him. I guess he's pursuing this from the standpoint of, "People are recording stuff on their PC without using MCE? Can they do that?" Haha

Thanks for tolerating my ignorance on the matter and telling me the real deal.