Capturing captions on the Hauppauge WinTV PVR cards

[tgc225]

I purchased a PVR-150 a few days ago, and I've just started getting into recording with it. However, I'd really like to capture closed captions, and I haven't been able to get it working. I tried following this guide:

http://www.geocities.com/mcpoodle43/SCC_TOOLS/DOCS/SCC_TOOLS.HTML#capture_analog

But it looks like it's geared for analog captures, and since the Hauppauge cards have hardware MPEG2 encoders, it looks like that method won't work, correct?

Also, I looked around a bit, and noticed the Hauppauge PVR-250 can record captions:

http://www.cask-of-amontillado.com/pvr_reg.html#_Enable_Closed_Captioning

That seems like a really easy way of doing it. Is the PVR-250 the best option? It costs more than the PVR-250, but captions are really important to me. Does anyone know if the PVR-150 will have this same type of caption support? Thanks!

[reboot]

I just checked at shspvr, and evidently no, the 150 cannot do CC.

[tgc225]

Thanks for the info. Do you by any chance know if it is a hardware limitation, or has no one modified it to do captions yet?

[hudsonf]

Check the site reboot mentioned it has a lot of info on the Hauppauge cards. http://www.shspvr.com/

[reboot]

CC comes in on "pin 21", and from what I've read, the 150 cannot separate that pin from the video stream to read the CC's. The 250 (and up) CAN do this, so it's got to be hardware.

[non-linear]

Closed captioning is stored on Line 21 of the vertical blanking interval. Since capture cards don't record the VBI data (just the visible video), the caption information would have to be stored separately as a data file. OF course, any trimming of the video would screw up the timing of the captioning, so if you take 2 minutes out of a video for commercials, then the captioning will be off by 2 minutes (plus you'd have the CC from the commercials stored as well).

I think the easiest way to capture and burn video with captioning is to use a standalone DVD recorder and do your trimming and burning on that. There doesn't seem to be much of a PC based solution out there to easily record, edit and author video with closed captioning.

[reboot]

Record and author, yes...edit, no. at least not easily (mux all streams first maybe, hard encode the CC's...)

[SLK001]

Most cards do not store the Line 21 data, so it has to be captured live. I have expensive MPEG2 hardware cards that would not even pass CC's through to the computer, and I have a cheap AVI capture card that passes Line 21 through with no problem. If you want them, capture the video live on your computer, and simultaneously record the video on a VCR. This tape video can then be used to extract the CC's using Graphedit, or what ever you want to use, later, from the original live broadcast.

Editing CC's is really pretty easy, but you have to be very understanding of the data stream and what you can, and what you can't do. McPoodle's SCCTOOLS has all the information that the novice should need.

[tgc225]

If anyone is interested, I sent an email to the cask-of-amontillado webmaster and he gave me this reply:

From what I know, the 150 driver does not support CC at this moment. But this will probably be changed in the near future (the 250 didn't support at first as well).