[mythtv-users] Saving Closed Caption (Teletext) from PVR 500 to view them on other video players.

[Daniel Kristjansson]

On Thu, 2007-09-20 at 02:20 -0500, TechBill wrote:
> I have recently install Mythbuntu and being deaf so I use closed captioning 
> enabled on PVR 500 which come out nice and sharp. I know that the closed 
> captioned are saved to mpeg file because I can use the ccextractor app to 
> extract perfect CC data from mpeg file saved by MythTV but it is not visable 
> on the video itself unless you play it back in MythTV or any player with 
> closed caption decoder which I haven't be able to find another player for 
> like my Windows Laptop to take my recorded show with me to watch them while 
> I travel.
> 
> My question is there a way to set MythTV to save Closed Caption onto the 
> video itself that it become open caption or write to mpeg file as a screen 
> capture so it write both the show and the caption on the show to mpeg file?

MythTV, as you say, does put the closed captions in the MPEG file but
they are in a ivtv specific format due to the limitations of the
hardware. What you can do is set up ccextractor or another extraction
applications that understand the ivtv CC format as a MythTV user job
that is run once the recording completes. Then you can use a transcoder
that understands the extracted caption stream to create an open
captioned stream. The MythTV video player actually understands some
external captions, if it finds "*.srt", "*.sub" or "*.txt" style
captions in the same directory as the video file it will decode them.
Of course, this won't help on Microsoft Windows.

-- Daniel