DVDs With No Closed Captions - Hauppauge HVR-1950/Motorola DCT700

[JimBarbasol]

A couple of years ago, I posted a thread here about how I could see closed captions from DVDs I made from captured TV programs on the TV, but not the computer. Back then, I had analog cable and had my Hauppauge tuner card connected directly to the cable outlet. The answer at the time was to run IFOEdit and check the boxes relating to the video content of the DVDs on my hard drive under "CC for Line 21." and then burn them to DVD. This worked at the time. I could then view the DVDs' CCs on both TV and PC.

Now, I'm on digital cable here in Canada, and it is encrypted, so I'm using a Motorola DCT700 set-top box connected via composite cables to my Hauppauge card, which then connects to the cable. When I author the DVD to the hard drive instead of the blank DVD, run IFOEdit, and perform the actions mentioned above, I no longer get CCs on either the computer or the TV. In the computer media player software, I am able to choose "Closed Captions" as an option, but they don't appear. The TV is set to Caption 1, and they don't appear, yet the CCs appear on commercial DVDs both on the PC and TV. Is the composite connection zapping the CCs here?

[usually_quiet]

A composite video connection (yellow port) can provide analog closed captions. The STB may not be sending them. Perhaps there is a menu setting that controls closed captions.

The other possibility is that you may not have analog closed captions available, and be limited to digital closed captions instead. If that is the case, your cable box has to decode them, and you can only record them as open captions, which are a permanent part of the picture.

[JimBarbasol]

Thanks for the reply. Here is an update. I figured it out. I wanted to see if I still got the CCs with analog cable, as I did two years ago, so I disconnected the digital cable and hooked up analog again. I made a DVD recording to a folder, used IFO Edit to set the CC flags, burned the recording to DVD, played it, and, surprisingly, the CCs were still absent even in the analog, which wasn't the case two years ago.

I started to think that this was perhaps a driver issue. I had the latest HVR-1950 driver from January of this year, but remembered that when I used to get CCs from analog two years ago the driver was from August, 2009. So, I hunted down the driver from August, 2009, ran hcwclear to remove the new driver and WinTV software, reboot the PC, then installed the August, 2009 driver and reinstalled WinTV. I then hooked up the cable to digital again, made a recording, authored it to a folder, ran IFO Edit to set the CC flags, burned the recording to DVD, played it and the DVD had the closed captions. It's pretty stupid how the new driver removed CC support. If anyone needs the old driver, I can provide it.