Panasonic AG-1970: Displaying Captions?

[MonicaMarlo]

Greetings Video Help Community-

Can anyone tell me how to display captions with a Panasonic AG-1970? I need to do a screen capture of playback of a video with captions displaying (or alternately figure out how to grab data from line 21 to parse .dfxp or .sub files from).

I'm happy to RTFM if someone will point me in the right direction; my initial digging for it remains fruitless.

Thank you kindly in advance for your guidance.

Monica Marlo

[jman98]

For those who don't know, this is a VCR.

Some video capturing devices are capable of recording closed captions from video sources. My Hauppauge PVR-350 can do this. I have personally verified that it works with some TV captures I did for a friend who speaks English as a second language. If you record the captions, you have to extract them from the video. This tool might help:
http://ccextractor.sourceforge.net/
There was a webpage at one time that explained in great detail how to use this, but I cannot find it now.

If you can find a manual for the player, it may tell how to get closed captions to display and you could take your screen capture while they are displayed. That would be easier than recording video and stripping out the CC stuff afterward.

[orsetto]

The AG-1970 is so old now I think it might even pre-date widespread adoption of closed captioning. In any case, like most VCRs it definitely pre-dates the age of having caption controls on anything but the television. In other words, while the AG1970 does record the hidden captions if they are embedded in the video signal, it has no built-in ability to display those captions thru its video or RF outputs: the only way to view the captions is by turning on the CC display in your television.

In fact, thats the quick'n'dirty method most people use if they want to "hard code" the captions as permanently visible when they copy a VHS tape to digital: use a television that has both line inputs and outputs. Connect the AG1970 to the TV, turn on the TVs caption display, and connect the line outs from the TV to your DVD recorder or PC. This usually works, the TV outputs whatever is showing on screen, although some TVs don't necessarily pass along the captions to their line outs- you'll need to experiment.

If putting the TV in the middle of your capture chain is not feasible, you'll either need some kind of external caption decoder accessory or a PC encoder card with its own caption controls. The AG1970 itself has no way to force caption display: the captions remain hidden until you pass the AG1970 signal to an external device which does have control over captioning display.

[MonicaMarlo]

Thank you Jman, Orsetto for quick and thorough replies- that helps. I assumed once I had gone over all buttons and controls on that displaying caption data might not be available on this old beast, but the capture quality I get when digitizing is so nice and clean I can't bear to part with it. And it's not surprising to find equipment this old in schools considering our budgets to be honest.

I have a Canopus ADVC 110 and access to a machine with a Happauage video card that we use for capturing as well. I'd prefer to have the captions file as data rather than permanently burnt into the image anyway since they can add cognitive load to viewers who don't need them- choice in learning, always best. And I've been trying CCExtractor, but can't get more than five minutes of data to parse, and am not even sure where to begin troubleshooting, but I"m likely going back to bang on that process until it works instead.