Tape player that does subtitles, finding one?

[jmthomas]

The VCR went belly up, so I replaced it with a Magnavox zv427mg9 vcr/dvr combo. I was unpleasantly suprised to find the VHS player side can't/won't play sub-titles (dialog words added to screen), let alone closed caption (descriptions as well as dialog).

I need a list of VHS tape machines that decode subtitles. I'd also like S-video. Recording is optional. Combos are OK.

Devices which play tapes are almost gone from the market (just a few, always combined with a DVR it seems). All the selling sites seem to ignore subtitling. Can you still get a new machine with that feature?

Thanks!

[usually_quiet]

The VCR went belly up, so I replaced it with a Magnavox zv427mg9 vcr/dvr combo. I was unpleasantly suprised to find the VHS player side can't/won't play sub-titles (dialog words added to screen), let alone closed caption (descriptions as well as dialog).

I need a list of VHS tape machines that decode subtitles. I'd also like S-video. Recording is optional. Combos are OK.

Devices which play tapes are almost gone from the market (just a few, always combined with a DVR it seems). All the selling sites seem to ignore subtitling. Can you still get a new machine with that feature?

Thanks!

DVD recorders and the DVD side of DVD-VHS combo units can display subtitles on DVDs. There are no VCRs that display selectable subtitles, since VHS does not support them. As far as closed captioning, most VCRs record line 21 analog closed captions and play back the part of the signal that that contains them, but I know of none that can decode and add closed captions to the video as open captions. The TV is always responsible for decoding and displaying the closed captions when you use a VCR.

There are four kinds of closed captions to consider: analog broadcast closed captions, DVD closed captions, EIA-608 digital broadcast closed captions and EIA-708 digital broadcast closed captions. No DVD recorder I have heard of is able to decode and display all four kinds of closed captions as a permanent part of the picture.

Some Magnavox HDD DVD recorders like the MDR513h/F7 and MDR515h/F7 can decode and display or record EIA-708 digital closed captions as open captions. However both those two models and other current model DVD recorders that support closed captioning add EIA-608 digital closed captions, DVD closed captions and analog broadcast closed captions to the VBI, and the TV must decode and display them.

...but in order for the TV to decode and display closed captions the connection used must capable of carrying the VBI portion of the signal. Coax, composite, and S-video connections can carry the VBI data that contains closed captioning, but component often doesn't and HDMI can't. Also, you must select interlaced output, not progressive. Progressive video signals don't include the VBI.

[jmthomas]

Thanks for your long reply. Maybe I can narrow down what I need.

First, the phrase "closed caption" seems to have two meaning, depending on who's talking and what part of the world they are in.

True Closed Caption is a facility designed for the visually impaired which is a big production. The words displayed on the screen describe what is going on, as well as the dialog being said. The result is something like a story book with pictures, the story being the CC annotations and the pictures are the video underneath the captioning. You might even be able to read the CC without looking at the picture at all and get a good idea of what is going on, even if few words are ever spoken. This CC feature for analog signals generally requires a special fancy decoder box that can cost as much as the VCR.

Subtitles are what I want. All you get is the words the actors speak. As I understand it, the TV does the decoding from an analog signal. This works for OTA and video tapes. The TVs like to call this "closed caption" and often offer 3 settings: off, on when muted, and always on. I'm going to say subtitles even though my TV refers to this feature as "CC".

I am not directly concerned about the digital captioning used on DVDs. I'm not clear on exactly where the bit representing the words are converted to pixels for the display. I've heard the player has to do something and I've heard the display has to do something, and there is a place in the digital bit stream for the bits representing the words, just as there is a place for the bits representing pixels and colors and audio. I'm also told that the digital subtitles are logically letters (think ASCII or Unicode), not pixels.

It used to be, that when I played a tape, the analog signal recorded on the tape (generally) contained subtitles, which were decoded by the TV. With my new VCR/DVR combo, words on the TV screen almost never appear when playing tapes that used to produce words using my old machine.

There are two ways to hook up my VCR/DVR to my TV, digital (with HDMI cable), or analog (the old yellow RCA connectors).

I believe that when the analog signal from the tape is converted to a digital signal (out over the HDMI cable), the subtitle component is apparently discarded. The digital bit stream arrives with the bits for the subtitles empty or unused.

If I hook up using analog connectors, then I should be delivering the subtitles to the TV. Since I've seen subtitles flash very occasionally, I'm assuming that digital TVs can still extract subtitles when given an analog signal. Of course, this disables all the improvement from going digital !

One theory is that the engineers doing the VCR side of my combo decided the subtitle component of the signal wasn't important to keep. Perhaps they thought their filter circuitry would pretty much remove it as a "side effect" and didn't add extra filtering to guarantee it's suppression. Cost reduction.

Or maybe they have poor circuitry, that when tested under ideal conditions, worked well enough for subtitles to be seen 99% of the time.

If that's true, then I need a better VCR, one with better electronics that deliberately maintains the subtitle portion of the analog signal.

Further, playback of copy protected tapes (Macromedia, etc) is lousy quality. Dim, sync occasionally list, colors washed, you know the list. I'd hope any recommended machines would only show these problems a minimal amount. With a combo unit, there's no way to put a TBG or regenerater between the VCR and the DTA.

Does anyone have a experience with a VCR (or combo containing a VCR), which I can buy today, which doesn't loose the subtitle component of the analog output, and plays copy protected tapes at good quality?

[jmthomas]

Now to revisit the subtitle problem in an analog to digital conversion.

Doing direct conversion of analog subtitles, as I understand it, is basically an optical character operation (OCR) like scanning a document. Isolating the words would be pretty straight forward: compare (digitized) screens with and without analog subtitles. All you would need is the decoder hardware ubiquitous to TVs and a good boost in CPU power to run the OCR program.

Doing this would definitely be a high end machine, I'm afraid. Probably need to take tapes to a sophisticated large scale professional conversion operation, like a movie studio would use to "digitally remaster" a film for re-release. Big bucks, not to mention the fair use/backup rights/copyright fight. Cheaper to rebuy the DVDs, heck even BRs, if you can find all your titles in a DVD/BR format....

But, there is a simple solution.

All the engineer has to do is include a subtitle decoder from a television. Given the zillion TVs that do decoding, the hardware should be available off the shelf and at low cost.

This implies two things:

1. Your VCR now determines if subtitles are displayed. It would have a subtitle button, just like the TV has a CC button.

As an illustration, if you were to record the VCR output on DVD, your recording would forever have subtitles over the pictures and you could not turn them off when you played the DVD.

2. Your VCR can now deliver subtitles to the digital world.

Since they are now part of the picture (the scan lines in the video stream) they get digitized and up-scaled and can even be in a "progressive" (non-interlaced) format. The player just keeps doing what it does today when it outputs a digit signal from an analog tape.

Is there a manufacturer that cares enough to provide a decoder in a consumer machine?

I suspect not, but if you don't ask the question...


PS: If you could access the analog signal before digital conversion, could you cable in an external subtitle decoder? I assume they made some 50 years ago, and if anyone kept one after TVs started having decoders... (Remember the UHF to VHF converter boxes?)

[usually_quiet]

First, you don't understand very much about any of the terminology or technology you are writing about. Your imagination is running rampant. There are laws, industry standards and FCC engineering specifications that determine how the various technologies work and how closed captioning is implemented. These are being largely complied with. If you want something different in closed captioning technology than what presently exists, then start writing letters to the major players in the consumer electronics industry, FCC, and Intel, since they invented HDMI.

Also if you want help from this forum, I have to tell you that burying your question under a mountain of drivel and opinions is unlikely to get you much. I'm done here.

[Cornucopia]

Let's back up a little bit. Your nomenclature is a bit off.

There are 2 kinds of technologies you're really dealing with: Closed-Captions & Subtitles.

The difference is NOT a contextual or semantic one, it's ONLY a functional/technical one.

BOTH CC's and Subs can show "captioning for the deaf/hard-of-hearing" with COMPLETE STORY NARRATION.
BOTH CC's and Subs can show "dialogue-ONLY" description.

CCs were MEANT to be an assistive technology, primarly for the deaf & hard of hearing, but there's NO requirement, either technical or legal, that says the descriptions MUST include all that additional info. That's just a common way of working "in the business".

Subs on DVDs are multiplexed along with the video & audio into the VOB file(s). When created & multiplexed, they consist of PICTURES - with decent resolution & frame rate (up to the full rez & full framerate), but with greatly reduced color capability. They are read by the player and then "composited" BY AND WITHIN THE PLAYER (or ignored altogether) along with the video, and the composited (burned-in) video is sent to the display, where NO FURTHER subs process is done.

Subs on BDs follow along the same lines, with the exception that they can ALSO inlcude a form that retains the text format (using OpenType fonts) in addition to the picture-only format. Note that the picture format of subs on BDs has MUCH better color resolution (yet still not as good as the color resolution of the video).

CCs use a couple of technologies (as previously mentioned).
The main ones I think you're referring to are the Analog and DVD closed-captions.
The EIA 708 and 608 (which are text digital data) occur only in digitally broadcast streams and arrive on Digital Tuners (either within the TV or within a DVR, or a cable stb). If the DVR or STB outputs to composite/interlace analog, it is required to convert to Analog (VBI Line21) closed-caption (with the Option to allow composited open captions, rarely implemented). If it receives a digital signal and tries to send it along as digital, it OUGHT to pass that CC along (as 608/708 data packets, muxed with the main signal) but there is no CLEAR current requirement that it do so - the law in the US hasn't really caught up with the change in technology.

The decoding of the CC (not subs) is supposed to be the responsibility of the DISPLAY. This means NOT the resposibility of the player or the cable. One can occasionally find a black box stb decoder, but they're few and far between (because there mainly not necessary, since Line21 decoding has been MANDATORY in nearly ALL TVs since '93 in the US) but they would have been cheap.

That's where this becomes a problem with DVI/HDMI, since it doesn't support VBI line 21 analog. It's DIGITAL, remember.

However, there are a number of DVD players that do decode/convert DVD closed-captions (which are stored as muxed data packets that "simulate" the line 21 coding) and composite them just like with "subtitles" into Open Captions (burned-in to the video).

CCs from VHS are of the Analog VBI Line21 type. This is deprecated, because VHS and Analog are really no longer going to be supported. The "improvement from going to digital" are NO improvement at all if one is starting out with ANALOG captions. To correctly implement captions in an "all improved digital world", one would use 608/708 captioning (for broadcast streams), or subtitling (for disc-based storage media, and theiir equivalents). Then there are improvements indeed! Also, I know when I still plug my old VHS player into my new HDTV via old composite cable, I get the benefits of CCs displayed AND upscaling to 1080. But I don't expect miracles. You want improved experience, use a complete set of thoroughly NEW technology, not a mishmash of both old and new.

When talking about converting Analog VBI Line21 CCs to digital, there is no normal form of OCR, because believe-it-or-not, the data that is sent through Line21 is actually digital data bits represented as black & white pulses. One could convert them to a standard digital packet with pattern recognition software that matched the "pictures" of the pulses with the known code possibilities in the spec. This WOULD NOT require a high end machine at all. The equivalent bitrate of the pulses is extremely LOW, and the code set is small (not even as big as extended ASCII), so with the right software, ANY PC could do this, but it would be specialized (rare) software.

This already exists. Many capture cards that encode to MPEG2 retain the CC VBI Line21 info as packets similar to DVD CCs. This also includes DVRs. But of course, it DOESN'T include regular DVD/BD players, as they're not recorders at all, they're PLAYERS. Your VHS/DVDplayer combo unit doesn't have a DVR, does it? That's why it normally wouldn't do the conversion. So the "siimple solution" is to get a true DVR or capture card for PC.

BTW, your timeline is also a little bit off. VBI Line21 CCs didn't get instituted until after 1976. That's 35 years ago (max), not 50.

If you think you can make a difference with the manufacturers, the ones you should be contacting probably ought to be those that manufacture the DVD/BD players - with the urging to include a "CC compositor" into the decoding to Open Captions. That would help.

Scott

[jmthomas]

Thanks Scott.

First problem -- a decent VCR.

I found a used JVC DR-MV1S DVD/VHS Recorder combo deck which the old LSI filtering/video compression chipset. All I need from this is the analog video out signal. That should get me back to where I was with my old VHS player.

(The DVR is bonus. My Audio theater box has been doing the up-scaling when I played my old tapes.)

Second problem -- capturing closed caption (Analog VBI Line21) for digital conversion, an interesting but not essential project.

I'll investigate Scott's suggestion of a video capture card for my PC. Thanks, Scott!

Anyone want to recommend a capture card with software to grab the Analog VBI Line21?