[mythtv-users] The state of ATSC closed captioning

[kanetse@gmail.com]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 10:55 AM, Phil Bridges <gravityhammer at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/3/17 Marco Nelissen <marco.nelissen at gmail.com>:
>> On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 8:53 AM, Phil Bridges <gravityhammer at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> 2009/3/17 Marco Nelissen <marco.nelissen at gmail.com>:
>>>
>>> During playback, are you selecting the ATSC captions, or the VBI captions?
>>
>> Unless I'm missing something, ATSC captions are the only ones available
>> (i.e. the menu only shows 'Select ATSC CC', and the only options in the
>> submenu for that are 'Toggle On/Off' and 'ATSC CC 1: English')
>
> Interesting - all the ATSC programs I've watched have options for both
> ATSC and VBI - at the resolutions I run, the VBI option is on the next
> "page".

In my opinion, this is one part of the mythfrontend interface that is
a little confusing.  I have mapped TOGGLECC708 and TOGGLECC608 on my
remote (via MythWeb) to two different keys.  That way, when one
doesn't work, I flip to the other.  Generally, if a recording has ATSC
(CC708) captions, you will see an option "Select ATSC CC" in the
OSD-menu, and if a recording has VBI (CC608) captions, you will also
see a second option "Select VBI CC".    If you don't see one or the
other, it means that it isn't present in your recording.

But I think those two options should really be merged together, and
there should be one button that toggles through all available caption
streams each time it's pressed.


As an aside, here is an observation that may have been unique to my
situation.  When I first started recording HD from my cable provider's
cable box, a Motorola DCT6416, my MythTV recordings only had garbled
ATSC captions as described by other users in this thread.  (OT - The
captions when displayed on the DCT6416 box itself were okay.)  There
were no VBI captions... so essentially captions in MythTV was useless.
 Then, about 5 months later, I bought a DCT6200 as a second tuner.
They were firewire/daisy-chained to the backend.  Now, I get VBI
captions from recordings on both tuners, and they look good.  I also
still get the ATSC captions, but they're still not usable.

So, somehow, adding a DCT6200 to my setup resulted in VBI captions
working in MythTV.