Issues in closed-captions extraction thru CCExtractor

[rajivrp]

Hi,

Am trying to extract captions from certain videos thru CCExtractor (ver 0.60) ... but getting blank srt files for all of them. Is CC a good tool or there are issues in it ?

Can someone pls tell me what is the way to verify whether closed-captions and / or sub-titles are present in any video or not ?

I am getting confused between the two ... I understand the different in terms of their application, but don't know what's the technical difference in terms of the way both are stored in a video. Video players like VLC and Windows Media Player don't seem to be differentiating between both, it's very difficult to find out whether the text we see is a closed-caption or a sub-title. It will be good if someone can shed some light on it ...

Thanks a lot in advance !

Rajiv

[cal_tony]

Sometimes MediaInfo will indicate CCs [EIA-608]. For me it's about 1/2 the time. VLC, the media player, does a much better job of indicating if CCs are present. Just click the Subtitles popout and it will let you know what type of subs are present.

As for CCExtractorGui, I've not experienced that many problems with it. Some input and output options have to be set. For inputs you need to tell the program if all the vobs are from the same video or if they are all separate videos. For outputs I always have it set for UTF 8.

Tony

[jman98]

You don't say what your source is. Closed captions are actually not all that common on DVD, although some DVDs do have them. Some video recording devices cannot preserve the closed caption information. If you're dealing with a TV recording that was encoded to another format after capture such as Divx/Xvid or H.264 MKV, the odds are that the closed caption information was permanently lost during the conversion, assuming that the original video capture actually preserved the CC info to begin with. For example, the Hauppauge PVR-250 and PVR-350 cards required a registry modification to be done manually to enable those cards to record CC information. Without the modification, they ignored it.

[rajivrp]

Thanks for replies ... sry if I am asking silly questions, but am new to some of these concepts / jargons.

cal_tony,

In VLC (2.0.1), in the right click pop-up menu and click on 'Subtitle', it always just shows either 'Track1' or nothing (i.e. 'Open the file'), I haven't ever seen it showing anything else for any video, my doubt it how do I know whether it is a sub-title or a closed-caption, if you have any closed-caption video sample for which VLC shows anything else other than that, I would want to have that clip if you can share. (Am infact anyway looking for some sample CC videos if anyone can share).

Not clear about the format ... I usually choose 'Autodetect the correct format' option, but after your suggestion, I tried all options available there, but none of them have helped, output type I have chosen as 'srt', I don't think that should be a problem.

What I have are normal computer format videos (mpeg, mp4, mpeg2, flv, etc) ... and each video is separate, and am trying only one video at a time in CCExtractor, so I hope that vob thing should not matter.

jman98,

I understand that perhaps during the conversion the CC info might have been lost, so that's what I am precisely trying to determine whether my videos have closed-captions not.

Thanks,
Rajiv

[cal_tony]

In VLC if the video has CCs clicking the subtitles would show Closed captions.

Also in CCExtractorGui if you input a file that you think has a CC than in the extract mode you should see the CCs being extracted. If nothing shows and the generated srt file is 0 bytes than it doesn't have CCs.

Tony

[rajivrp]

There's one particular video I have that I know for sure has closed-captions, and I have managed to verify it by extracting the same thru a commercial software called Flip Factory, but CCExtractor is unable to extract.

In that also I don't see anything in VLC ... neither captions in the video, nor anything in the sub-title menu, not sure whether the captions are stored in standard way or not.

Am trying gather info about how exactly the closed-captions are internally stored in a video and in which standard vis-a-vis sub-titles, but not getting any authentic source thru googling, please let me know if anyone has any specific good link on the subject, and / or also some sample CC video clips.

Thanks,
Rajiv