Extract captions from digitized VHS (DV AVI)?

[ogrgkyle]

As an archivist, I have a library of many DV AVI files, which are digitized VHS tapes. Sometimes during a TV recording, the top line of the video appears to be scrambled. Is this the caption data? Please take a look at the top line in the attached photo to see what I mean.

If this is caption data, how can I dump it into an SRT (subtitle) file? Thanks!

[Vidd]

There is no caption data that you will be able to extract from the DV AVI. However, the captions will be on the VCR tapes. If you have access to the tapes and wish to digitize them again, many capture card software has an option to save or extract the captions. For example, the old ATI Wonder card driver had an option to save captions to file or plain text with timecodes.

[ogrgkyle]

Okay. Thanks for the quick reply!

[Brad]

I'm guessing the OP will never see this, but someone recently wrote a Python program designed to take a video capture with visible line 21 data and create a closed caption data file which can be converted to SRT. The author was working with uncompressed video as his source, but the page notes that he used ffmpeg so any reasonable format should work as the input.

http://notonbluray.com/blog/closed-captions-python/
http://notonbluray.com/blog/scc-closed-captions-python/

[ogrgkyle]

I saw it! Thanks for the interesting links. I've never used Python, but I'll see if I can get the script to run.