Analog Captions (VBI) don't work with HVR-2250 [North America]

[sailerboy]

I'm able to view analog captions just fine from WinTV, and when I record a show, CCExtractor is able to find and extract captions without a problem, but the same is not the case with NextPVR, as neither LiveTV, nor recording LiveTV, nor viewing the recorded file with WinTV works. CCExtractor doesn't find anything with or without the flag --hauppauge. As I am deaf, this makes it very difficult to watch TV. Digital captions work just fine.

[mvallevand]

Change your mpeg2 decoder to use the one that WinTV uses, MainConcept. Technically they aren't VBI anymore after capture.

Martin

[sub]

The HVR-2250 doesn't encode the closed captions into it's MPEG2 output, so you wont get closed captions in anything other than WinTV (which uses a proprietary approach to capture them, and store them in a non-standard place in the resulting recording).

[mvallevand]

I now remember reading that about the 2250 but is it possible something has changed if ccextractor works?

Martin

[sailerboy]

I'm using MainConcept, and it still doesn't work. The recorded file in C:\Users\Public\Videos has captions embedded that CCExtract can extract (with the flag --hauppauge), but recordings by NextPVR do not have captions that CCExtract can see.

Is there any hack or workaround that uses wintv to tune the channel, while using nextpvr to display the resulting TS in C:\Users\Public\Videos\Pause Buffer (since CCExtract can extract the captions from that TS file)?

[sub]

I now remember reading that about the 2250 but is it possible something has changed if ccextractor works?

No, nothing changed. Hauppauge just provided info to the ccextractor guys with info to tell them how to extract the non-standard cc bytes pairs from WinTV's TS recordings, and they added support for it with this --Hauppauge flag.

As mentioned, this will only work for WinTV recordings though. Recordings from anything else wont have closed captions in the recording.

[mvallevand]

Is there any hack or workaround that uses wintv to tune the channel, while using nextpvr to display the resulting TS in C:\Users\Public\Videos\Pause Buffer (since CCExtract can extract the captions from that TS file)?

Let's see what sub says. I could probably start wintv7rec from NetworkRecorder.

Martin

[sailerboy]

What are the chances of Hauppauge releasing a decoder or a driver that would allow NextPVR to decode the captions? I'm guessing it'll probably be slim since it's been out for over 5 years now...

[sub]

Unfortunately there is very little I can.

It is a complicated problem to capture the closed captions if a hardware encoder device doesn't encode them into the video stream. I know how this alternative closed caption system works in WinTV (and may or may not have had a hand in it's development...neither confirm nor deny), but it relies on a lot of code to make it work. In NextPVR I decided to avoid complications like this and instead only worry about supporting closed captions on hardware encoder devices that capture them in their MPEG2 stream.

[sailerboy]

So there's not a whole lot that can be done without creating a separate plugin, along with extensive coding knowledge (which I don't have). Do you know if any other PVR that would support the captions? I'd much prefer NextPVR due to the intuitive interface and most importantly, the cost, but captions are seriously a dealbreaker for me, and I'd be willing to pay a bit extra to have something that supports them. WinTV isn't very good with the scheduling for recordings, and doesn't really have a great 10 foot ui, and it seems that Media Center only finds about 10 channels, and ignores all the other ones that don't have EPG readily available.

Why did Hauppauge decide to make captions so difficult to capture? :'(

EDIT: This is fairly unlikely that I'd be willing to spend that much, but are there any dual tuner cards that support captions in NextPVR?