Subtitles

[SimonP]

I just tested one of my Nebula DigiTV recordings in the hope that the new subtitle support would work but alas no :(

Are there plans to further develop the subtitle support or do you only intend to support CC?

(I'll happily supply a test recording if necessary)

[HyperReality]

You may wish to read this post (http://www.videoredo.net/msgBoard/showthread.php?t=6106) regarding uploading of subtitle/closed caption samples.

We've already provided some Australian samples (including DigiTV recordings), though if you are in the UK then you have a different format to what is used here (DVB subtitles, versus VBI teletext captions in Aus), and I'm sure the VRD devs will appreciate as much data to test with as possible. :)

[phd]

Where are you located?

[Dan203]

We don't have subtitle support we have closed caption support. Closed captions are the captions for the hearing impaired which are stored in the VBI portion of broadcast television feeds and displayed using your TVs built in CC decoder. Subtitles are bitmap images which are added to the VOB stream of a DVD and displayed by the DVD player on top of the video data.

Creating subtitles from CC data would require us to actually decode the CC data to text and then create a bitmap for every screen of text. Not only is that difficult to do but it would require a lot of bitmaps, and in turn quite a bit of temporary disk space. (about 1200 bitmaps and ~100MB per hour of video) That's not to say we wont ever do it, we just don't have the resources to do it now. So for now we're trying to retain the CC data in your files so that you can continue to use your TVs built in CC decoder to display the captions.

Dan

[dezzy]

This thread has introduced some uncertainty in my understanding regarding the capability of TVS.

Will TVS be able to extract subtitles from the broadcast TV stream and allow these to be incorporated into an authored DVD? No doubt there may be different answers for different countries and different broadcast systems.

For instance, for Australian digital TV broadcasts, ProjectX will extract the Teletext subtitles as either text or bitmaps (say .sub or .srt or some other options) as part of the elementary streams.

These streams can be remuxed and authored to DVD with one of the DVDAuthor variants. The resulting DVD has the subtitles.

I wish that TVS would do the same.

You say that the current Beta TVS has some subtitle capability. How can this be accessed and used?

[DanR]

The current beta of TVS has NTSC closed captioning to DVD capability. Subtitles for DVB broadcasts are not yet supported, but we are working on it.

[SimonP]

I've PM'ed phd with a test recording (UK, DVB-SUB) and hope it helps.

Do you have even a rough idea of when you're likely to be able to support them? I'm using up masses of disk space because I can't edit my recordings without losing the subtitles (I'm very hard of hearing) and eventually plan on compressing my MPG recordings to DivX so if VRD/TVS was also able to extract them it'd be very handy as I could then just OCR them to .srt afterwards.

[dezzy]

I note your comment that subtitle support for PAL TV is not yet ready.

As an interim step is it possible to get TVS to process subtitles if the input video is from a DVD (on hard disk) that includes subtitles? Or alternatively, input elementary streams including subtitles?

[DanR]

Sorry, no its all part of the same issue of VideoReDo only processing 2 steams, an audio stream and a video stream. The bulk of work in supporting subtitles of all forms is demuxing, storing and remuxing the 3rd stream.