[mythtv-users] Moving recordings onto DVD with subtitles

f-myth-users at media.mit.edu f-myth-users at media.mit.edu
Sun Dec 11 14:28:34 EST 2005


    Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2005 11:20:05 +0000
    From: Piers Kittel <mythtv at biased.org>

    Hello all,

    As I'm deaf, I require to watch TV with subtitles - there's no choice 
    for me really.  Anyway, I'm using MythTV taken from SVN only so I can 
    have subtitle support which 0.18.1 doesn't have.  My hard drive is 
    filling with programs I want to keep, and I want to transfer it to video 
    DVD but I want to peserve the subtitles - i.e. I can put it in my bog 
    standard DVD player, start playing and select "English Subtitles" and it 
    works.  How can I do this if it's any way possible?  If selection is not 
    possible, is it possible to "paste" subtitles on the screen making "open 
    captions", and if this isn't possible, what are my options?

I have half of a possible solution for you, thanks to Hui Zhou's
little utility which I recently discovered while trolling the
archives of the ivtv-devel list.

Grab http://www.wam.umd.edu/~zhouhui/vbiutil-20050928.tar.gz

This tool produces timestamped ASCII text of the closed captioning,
suitable for input via the -sub switch for mplayer (assuming you've
made sure mplayer has OSD fonts and so forth).  It requires the CC
data written to the stream by the PVR-x50 hardware encoders, and will
-not- work if you've transcoded the streams (because mythtranscode
doesn't support CC data and throws it away).  It's three small
programs and a readme that tells you how to use them.

I don't know if any DVD-authoring software can take such a list (or
such a list after being filtered through some trivial perl script to
change its syntax) and produce new subtitling, but maybe someone else
does.

An alternative (which would mean giving up on using a standalone DVD
-player- per se, and using a DVD drive in a computer instead) would
be to keep both the original MEGP2 stream around, and the text file
produced by the utility above (which is tiny---on the order of 20-30K
per hour, and of course you could gzip it if you cared), and write
both files to a DVD as normal data files.  Then, to play them, use
"mplayer -sub cc.txt program.mpeg2" (approximately) and play the data
directly off the DVD that way.


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