Closed Captioning

[Logan]

It never ceases to aggravate me that the most basic function of recording Closed Captioning is still non-existent in PVR software. Unless things have changed recently, no PVR software will digitize the entire vertical blanking interval (VBI) and regenerate it upon playback. Yet, TiVo and DVD players perform this flawlessly. So is it a hardware or a software issue and can GB-PVR support it?

[Stimpy]

Actually GB-PVR does support recroding closed captions if you are using a PVR-350 card. Other cards may work as well but I have no way to verify this.

You have to do a bit of tweaking in order to enable it. See this thread:
http://gbpvr.com/cgi-bin....;t=2885
and this one
http://gbpvr.com/cgi-bin....;t=3056

I currently have it set up so that captions do get recorded in the MPG file. As for displaying captions when watching a show, you can do this in one of three ways.

1) If you're using your VGA output and you have caption playback enabled in GB-PVR, then your PC will overlay the captions on the screen. This works whether you're using VGA out or TV-out though your VGA card.

2) If you want your TV to do the overlay (so that you can toggle captions on and off with your TV's remote), then you need a card that is cable of doing VBI re-insertion. Most VGA cards with TV-out can't do this, but I think the PVR-350 card can do it if you have the latest drivers. I haven't tried this yet since I'm using older drivers but I believe the PVR-350 playback filter does have a VBI re-insertion pin. I'll play around with GraphEdit once I have newer drivers installed.

3) Record the MPG file to a DVD and enable VBI re-insertion in your DVD player's menu. This method works well and lets you toggle the captions on and off with your TV's remote.

[Steerpike]

Is there any update to this topic - I'm interested to know if users have been successful with CC's and the TV-OUT of the PVR-350 card.

[sub]

No, what you're asking is not possible. The be honest, you're talking to the wrong people. If you want to see closed captioning working in the PVR350 tv out, you'd have to talk to Hauppauge.

[smprather]

I just wanted to throw more weight behind closed captioning requests. My hearing was impaired by chemotherapy. I am having trouble finding PC based PVR software that supports CC "out of the box" (ie, without having to read forum posts to get it working and understand a myriad of buzz words). My ReplayTV works just fine. My TimeWarner supplied PVR works ok-ish though the HiDef support for CC is sketchy at best (has nothing to do with PVR though). It also seems to goof up the time-synchronicity of CC display vs. when the characters are speaking the words. Often it displays the text well *before* the words are spoken (really really frustrating).

I am utterly amazed at how such a simple concept (encoding a stream of text with video) is so often fumbled by our media machines. As video travels through all the turnstyles from media provider to our video display of choice, it only takes one boneheaded error (some tech guy sets knob-XYZ to 14 instead of 12) to kill the CC attached to the video.

[sub]

As I said above, you're talking to the wrong person. The reason none of the PVR applications support this, is because driver manufacturers dont really make it practical to implement. (there is a bit more to it than twiddling the knob though )