Anyway to Capture Closed Captioning from VHS or TV??

[strep]

Hi...I was just wondering if anyone here had any solutions towards capturing closed captioning. I realize that what I want is seemingly impossible, but is there any way of burning a VCD or DVD from captured video where you would be able to turn the closed captioning either on or off??

Thanks for any suggestions.

[Betamax]

No, Not possible.
The captioning is part of the video, when the source is from TV or VHS.

[strep]

First off, let me say that I'm not sure if ReplayTV actually does this....But, how does ReplayTV manage to encode to MPG2 and still maintain closed captioning feature (for instance if you want to record your show and view it later). Shouldn't we be able to do something like that with our PCs and video capturing/encoding software?

[ironwood321]

Only special videos can record close caption or subtitle not the regular ones. If you wish to decode it from live TV you need a decoder chip and a hook up to a data input.

Or you will have to find a program which will extract data from around line 21 and decode it to close caption (US) or Teletext (UK). the only non PC commercial device that could do this was ProGrab 24RT pro for the Amiga you could dump the entire teletext magazine to a special file.

They did a teletext only decoder might be for the PC as well.
Otherwise you have to find or write software for your chipset. http://www.elsat.com.pl/english/download.html

If you are into electronics it might be worth building this http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/pic/caption.html Its based on the pic chip.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: ironwood321 on 2001-07-29 11:44:38 ]</font>

[strep]

I've noticed that there are a few TV cards for the PC that have the capacity to create a closed captioning file containing the text. Is there any way of using something like this to create the closed caption signal and then re-encode it to captured video (for playback as (S)VCD to my television).

For my needs of created closed captioned VCDs, I am not opposed to buying specialized decoding hardware that coudl extract data from line 21. The question I have is how I could re-encode this information on the video that I captured and have encoded to mpeg. Any ideas?

I have a feeling there must be a way to do what I want (i.e. creat VCDs with closed captioning from VHS or TV signals) and I really do appreciate any ideas about how to go about this

Thanks a million!!

[Psx]

I Know that my Radeon VIVO lets me to extract the subtitles from a video stream.

[ironwood321]

Extraction seems the easy part you either need a capture card which will produce subtitle with resysnc info or hardware which will save to your own custom text file with info you can use to resync. Then you have to resync it to video and playing back correctly. You can only do this as far as I know with divx or dvd and a special player. DVD's use bitmaps and divxs ocr text from bitmaps. These run from textfiles.

Does VCD support subtitles? The only creation tools which are better than standard ones included with cd-writers are vcdgear and vcdimager. Track them down and look at there instructions. Are you sure you are not mistaken and thinking of karaoke CD'S which play stills to subtitles and data is stored in the sub channel.

Email the authors of these packages and ask do they support subtitles or rather does vcd support subtitles and if so will they be adding it in the near future. If your capture card cannot dump CC data with resync info you have to consider the electronic option and pipe it in via your serial port to a custom txt file you designed with resyncing info. then convert this to the required format.

All I know is there a 3 formats of VCD's version 1 / 1.5 / 2 and not all player will play svcds or xvcds etc.
(S)VCD and (X)VCD are not widely supported and might not support subtitles or you have to put in a lot of effort ie write tools to make them work.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: ironwood321 on 2001-07-29 11:59:16 ]</font>