DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Heath Stewart — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 22:14:55 GMT

Wow! Very nice. I especially like the IFilter. You should clean it up a little (make it robust, as you mentioned) and post it on http://addins.msn.com. I think that's a wonderful idea and certainly makes videos more discoverable since metadata contains little about the content of the video.

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

toub — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 07:41:02 GMT

Thanks, Heath. Glad you like it! I do plan to rework the IFilter a bit when I have some more spare time; I'm constrained slightly by the interfaces exposed from sbe.dll, but it should be doable. In the meantime, the IFilter does work fairly well, so I hope it's useful to folks.

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Ryan Hirschey — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 21:41:10 GMT

Stephen,

Your XPMCE tools (especially the metadata tag editor and the DVR-MS Editor) are simply awesome. Both have proven very useful in optimizing my Media Center experience. I certainly hope Bill and Steve are keeping you happy. We want you around writing this blog for a long time to come... :-)

One question I have on the DVR-MS Editor. After I edit a file to remove commercials, I notice the KB/second rate in the output file is less than the original. Is there anything that is "lost" as a result (closed captioning, audio/visual quality, etc.)? I have also noticed that the Sonic DVD writer seems to have trouble recognizing the output file if I try to burn it to a DVD, complaining of an encoding issue. Is there a workaround for this?

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Yakov — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 10:46:07 GMT

hi, see if you can help me.
i'm looking for away to grab the closed caption data as string data from real time video stream. that mean i can get the text data of the closed caption when i'm waching video from my capture device.
any suggestion would be appriciate.
thanks

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Stuart — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 20:26:42 GMT

I have been using the DVR-MS Editor, it's very good, however My question relates to the transcoding to wmv, is there any way to increase the quality of the wmv file? it seems to be set pretty low, 800mb dvr-ms = 18mb wmv, I have read though you r articles but I can't see any mention of increasing the quality of the wmv.

thanks

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Stuart — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 20:39:41 GMT

oops, found your answer on another post

Sure, just specify a Windows Media Profile (.prx) as the second arg on the command line and that profile will be used instead of the poor-quality default. You can easily create profiles using the Windows Media Profile Editor that's included with the Windows Media Encoder, available for free on the Microsoft site.

excellent :)

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Alex Sirota — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 23:01:41 GMT

What an awesome idea... Now what would be really interesting is to somehow start capturing the closed caption info and make it available in a peer to peer fashion so you could actually set favorites to record based on content rather than just by name.

The real power in this is that the metadata currently available for a show is not that complete... Plus the credits, if available in the closed caption, basically summarize the entirety of the show to the most complete level imaginable. After all apart from the video, the titles and audio are all that is left...

Once that is done automatically and in peer to peer fashion you could do things like:

- record certain types of commercials, provided they are CC'd

- record certain types of show based on keywords and other phrases

The notion of intelligent recording would be revolutionized by making CC info available as part of the digital stream.

Programmatic access to closed captioning data in Media Center

Aaron Stebner's WebLog — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 21:58:25 GMT

One of the folks I talked to at CES 2006 last week asked me about how to use Media Center extensibility...

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Jonathan Rachlin — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 22:00:37 GMT

Very interesting article. Your listing of closed-captions is exactly what I've been looking for.

However, I need to know -- I have a Toshiba Satellite A75 notebook (3.2 Ghz), but it does not include Windows Media Center. What do I ultimately need in order to create the files for doing this -- to create the dvr-ms files? Can I install appropriate capture devices on a laptop, and create the appropriate files with some readily available software, or do I need to buy a computer with Windows Media Center installed?

Many thanks, and again, this ia a really cool application.

Jon Rachlin

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

toub — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 23:12:56 GMT

Jon, glad you liked the article. DVR-MS files are created by Media Center, and as of right now, I know of no other system that saves recorded content as DVR-MS. Note that Media Center will be included in some versions of Windows Vista. As for capturing TV signals, you'll need a capture card of some sort, and companies like Hauppauge do make USB tuner devices, so you could certainly pick one of those up for your laptop. All that said, what I described above could probably be accomplished for other file formats as well; I just based this on DVR-MS because I like the format and have a Media Center at home.

Holy DVR-MS!

Service Station, by Aaron Skonnard — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 01:22:40 GMT

MCE won't output TV's CC

RHR — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 20:22:05 GMT

I want TV or DVR-MS can output TV's cc but I don't want MCE's CC becuaes I not read small CC and no background, I would output CC available?

DVR-MS copy BurnDVD, WMV, AVI, etc..

RHR — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 20:24:20 GMT

DVR-MS copy to BurnDVD, WMV, AVI, MEPG won't work CC,

Any idea?

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Josh — Sun, 21 May 2006 22:14:01 GMT

Hi! interesting stuff, there!
I have a tricky one for ya all: If I have website with an embedded WMP and want to enable the viewer to turn on and off his or hers cc without opening the WMP, how do I do That!?

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

toub — Mon, 22 May 2006 23:37:10 GMT

Josh, unfortunately I don't think it's currently possible to control that setting programmatically through the WMP API; there may be a way, and if you find one, I'd be interested in hearing about it.

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Amber Lopez — Fri, 26 May 2006 06:42:55 GMT

Steve,

I am not sure I am on the right page, but your article seemed interesting! I just got a Lenovo 3000 C100. I alos have Dishnetwork 625 DVR.

I know there is a way to get my tv to recognize my laptop, and vice versa. I also know that there is a way for me to download my recorded shows on my dvr to my laptop for me to view.

Could you either please help or direct me to the right direction? I have googled my brains out.

Mind you I am not as sharp nor smart as therest of thee.

Thanks!
Amber

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Jon Rachlin — Tue, 30 May 2006 16:55:59 GMT

I just bought a new Media Center notebook (see above post), and have tried your program on Spanish tv shows. It works very nicely, with one exception.

The extended characters of the EIA-708B don't show up in your parser, even though they show up in the captions on tv. For instance, the word niño shows up as nio.

I notice that in the NTSCClosedCaptionParser, you are only looking for the letters of the English alphabet: you have a line of code --

if (b >= 0x20 && b <= 0x7a)

Do you have any ideas about how to handle this?
I tried changing the code to

if (b >= 0x20 && b <= 0xff)

but it didn't work. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place.

Again, thanks for a great article. I bet you didn't think that one of its uses would be to improve one's Spanish.

Jon Rachlin

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

toub — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 02:30:50 GMT

Hi Jon- Glad you enjoyed the code and are finding it useful! The code was really meant to be an approximation of 608b, and as such if you look at the spec and compare it to the code, you'll see that I've omitted some things. For example, as you saw, I only pay attention to values <= 7a, since those pretty much map to their ASCII equivalents and thus I can get close to correct results with minimal results simply by casting the value to a Char. If you look at the spec though, you'll see that the is 0x7E, but it's not in ASCII, which means you won't get by casting 0x7E to a Char, which is probably why this didn't work for you when you extended the comparison range. You could try adding code to explicitly convert certain values into Chars and see if that helps. In general though, as I said, I intended this to be enough of a prototype/proof-of-concept to get basic applications up and running, but it's definitely not (nor was it intended to be) a 100% compatible implementation of the specification. Hope that helps!

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Jonathan — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 23:10:52 GMT

Interesting ideas. I have an issue that seemed simple, but there are no viable solutions to it -- is there any way to take these extracted CCs and burn them onto DVDs with the video for use on a settop player. I have run into many brick walls trying to research this topic, and was wondering if you had any insights as to how to address this. This would be an immense asset to hard of hearing users that use MCE.

Thanks

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

toub — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 00:40:02 GMT

It's probably possible using a DVD editing application that allows you to add captioning. I believe commercial apps let you do this, though I've never tried, and I'm not sure if any have SDKs or object models against which you can program. You could certainly extract the closed captions along with time codes, so if you found a program that let you burn them to DVD, you could output them in whatever format was necessary for the DVD app to load.

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Mike Lanza — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 09:38:08 GMT

I want to hire someone to implement a simple custom system that would generate a text file with timecodes and captions, then upload these timecode/caption pairs into a database. Also, we'd want some other stuff (auto-transcoding the video file, uploading the transcoded file, etc.), , but the cc generation is where I'm stuck right now. See www.click.tv to see what we're driving at.

Does anyone have any ideas who could do this job quickly and efficiently?

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

masik — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 09:41:26 GMT

Great article. I came across this from Green Button forum when I was directed to read this artichle for my question I had posted. I did not find answer to my question, which was while buring DVD of MCE recorded programs, CC data is not being written to DVD. In other words, DVDs created by ClickToDVD sw (from Sony on VAIO) of the MCE recorded TV shows, do not have CC function, even thought the CC exists in the recording on MCE. How would I know where to look and debug this problem? Any help form you is appreciated?

Thanks in advance.

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

toub — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 17:09:49 GMT

Hi Masik-

It's not a problem that requires debugging; the feature you're looking just wasn't implemented in the program you're using (I'm not aware of any programs that implement it). You can probably get the functionality you require by using a professional DVD creation application, many of which allow for the creation of subtitles, but most of those, even if they accept DVR-MS files as input, probably wouldn't extract the CC information from the DVR-MS and use it for the DVD subtitle track; you'd probably need to write your own tool to extract the CC data into a format consumable by the DVD application. A good place to start, then, would be with the sample code I've provided here.

Good luck.

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Jesper — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 18:22:14 GMT

Hi, very nice site. I have here a dvd that includes closed captions. These are shown when playing in media center 2005. Is there a way to extract the captions to .srt or .sub format? Maybe a hint on how to do it?

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Mircea — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 02:02:11 GMT

Great work. Every article of yours brings so much to the table.

I have though a problem situated before the CC stream gets into the dvrms file and because of this I can’t use the code in your examples. Hoping that you might have that kind of knowledge here's what's happening. While Live TV, the CC stream misses letters or words. This happens, for every line and it's sometimes worse, sometimes not so worse. Only once, recently, for one show I couldn't believe, CC was flawless, but it was just one time. In the recorded file the situation is the same so, it's not a matter of displaying them wrongly. A lot of people told me that Hauppauge (the brand I own) makes bad drivers and this causes the problem. I don’t think so, because using the same hardware configuration (where MCE fails on CC), I tried another PVR-TV application (Chris TV) which displays 24/7 flawless CC. This leads me to believe that's something in particular with the way MCE reads or interprets the CC from the cable signal. Now, believe me I searched hundreds of websites and I lost my hope to find an answer as it’s a long time now since I’m doing this. Any hint or recommendation of who or where to ask further would be welcomed.

Regards.

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

toub — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 03:39:20 GMT

Mircea, I've never heard of this problem before, so unfortunately I don't have a good answer for you. I did forward your question to folks on the MCE team, and someone there might have a better idea of what's happening. Out of curiosity, what version of MCE are you using? If you upgrade to Vista (currently at RC1), do you have the same problem?

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

TYC — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 01:18:26 GMT

Hey, I just found these tools to convert DVr-ms closed caption into .scc files, pretty cool. Good article BTW.

http://www.geocities.com/mcpoodle43/SCC_TOOLS/DOCS/SCC_TOOLS.HTML#dvr2scc

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Mircea — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 03:52:11 GMT

Stephen, sorry for taking so long.

I didn't try it on Vista yet as it's a "production" machine and I need to make some preparations before.

Oh by the one that I'm using it's a MCE 2005 and updated on an automatic fashion.

I was thinking of calling MCE support but as I worked myself in Perf I know the many possible scenarios a ticket can go through. Maybe by e-mail ... anyway.

Thanks for the answer though, as I know you would've helped if you can. I'll take this as one of my longest cases :( and I don't care about the survey as I'm my own customer :).

Please, keep up the good work.

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

TYC — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 14:53:07 GMT

I'm curious too, how to convert the captions from ExtractCloseCaptions.exe to an .ssa or .srt subtitle format. I'll do the wmv as a last resort but I'd prefer just to use one of those subtitle formats

I have here a dvd that includes closed captions. These are shown when playing in media center 2005. Is there a way to extract the captions to .srt or .sub format? Maybe a hint on how to do it?

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Stephen Toub — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 16:38:06 GMT

ExtractCloseCaptions is just a sample wrapper around my underlying sample library for extracting close captions from NTSC DVR-MS files. If you look at the library, it gives you back a .NET collection of the captions, and ExtractCloseCaptions just iterates through them and writes them to the console. You can write your own app to iterate through them and do whatever you want with them, including writing them to whatever format you desire.

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

TYC — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 15:00:59 GMT

Thanks for the quick reply Stephen, I'll try and figure out how to do this!

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Jesper — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 20:31:21 GMT

Does somebody know if there is a collection or object holding the closed captions when they are being shown during playing in MCE2005? If that is the case, i would you like to use it in a program which i code myself to output the closed captions from a dvd to a file.

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Murali — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 13:43:12 GMT

Hi Stephen,

I am trying to extract CC text from TV Tuner

(ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0). Not succeeded in

setting up the filter graph with ATI provided filters.

What is the minimum set of filters required

to extract CC text? I am not interested in the

video as the software I am building has to

analyze CC text alone.

Thanks a ton in advance,

Murali

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

toub — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 17:43:19 GMT

I've never used an ATI TV Wonder USB, and I unfortunately don't know anything about the drivers and filters assocated it. Regardless, best of luck with your project.

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Nick — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 00:55:33 GMT

Hi Stephen,

So I'm using converttowmv to convert from .dvr-ms files to .wmv files in Vista RC1, but the output video looks very strange. It basically has a greenish tinge and it looks like part of the video is reflected and distorted in the lower part of the frame. Using the standard .prx or another custom one that I made doesn't seem to make a difference. Any ideas/suggestions for what might be going on? I thought that it might have to do with the frame size, which is why i tried the custom .prx that didn't resize the frame, but that didn't do it.

Thanks,

Nick

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

toub — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 07:53:30 GMT

To be honest, I haven't tried converttowmv on Vista yet, though I plan to shortly. I'll let you know if I run into a similar issue, and if I do, if I end up with a solution.

re: DVR-MS: srt subtitles

jeff — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 04:39:32 GMT

Wondering if anyone out there could make this so extractclosedcaptions outputs to srt format...see (http://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=314307) for an example. I am not a programmer otherwise I am sure its not too difficult....raakjoer_AT_gmail.com

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Bill — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 01:25:23 GMT

I was trying to compile the code with Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Edition, and everythine was fine except "using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word;" is not there.

I downloaded Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.dll online, and the code is now working.

I wanted to do some Closed Caption stuff with the drv-ms files I have.

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

toub — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 19:28:08 GMT

Bill, do you have Office installed? If so, during Office installation, did you explicitly request to install the interop DLLs? You can go back to Add/Remove Programs and change the installation so that it adds them.

That aside, there's just one sample project in the solution that relies on that DLL, and it's not necessary for anything but that sample app. Just remove the complaining project from the solution and all should be well.

-Stephen

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Clifford Lazar — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 08:44:15 GMT

Can you tell me the steps to get the SDK for Vista Digital Video Recorder.

Is there a way I can contact an experienced Vista DVR programmer?

Cliff Lazar

cliff@lazardev.com

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

toub — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 21:11:04 GMT

http://blog.mediacentersandbox.com/PermaLink,guid,c0603f22-6b40-47d0-8e41-3254a68b1ac3.aspx

http://blog.mediacentersandbox.com/ct.ashx?id=c0603f22-6b40-47d0-8e41-3254a68b1ac3&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.microsoft.com%2fdownloads%2fdetails.aspx%3fFamilyId%3dA43EA0B7-B85F-4612-AA08-3BF128C5873E%26displaylang

Closed Captioning In Amcap

Aurilieus — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 16:12:50 GMT

Can anyone guide on getting CC working on Amcap. It would be a great help.

Thnx

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Val — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 22:32:34 GMT

Hi Stephen,

"Display Time" and "Clear Time" frequently have same values in movies I record on my MS Media Center. Also, sometimes the difference between the two time values is less than .5 sec which is too short for normal audience.

When I watch these recorded movies with captions enabled in MS Media Center, the captions show up and stay on the screen for a reasonable time, even when "Display Time" and "Clear Time" have indicate the same value.

What's wrong? Why am I not getting the true "Display Time" and "Clear Time" values in these fields? Any advice?

Thank you,

Val

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

toub — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 22:58:15 GMT

Val, are these SD or HD recordings? It's certainly possible that my state machine used in the decoding isn't quite up to snuff, but I'd need to see any example before I could figure out why it wasn't working the way you expect.

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Val — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 05:50:52 GMT

Stephen -- it's the SD recordings I am dealing with. My system is Dell XPS 600 with a Dell-supplied Angel MPEG TV tuner and capture card. To my experience, the "Display Time" appears to be correct at least in most cases, but the "Clear Time" is likely incorrect and in some cases it simply cannot be correct. Below are the opening CC lines for the movie "Jersey Girl" I recently recorded:

Start Display Clear Text

00:00.562 00:00.763 00:00.763 (bell rings)

00:00.764 00:01.464 00:01.964 (woman) Everyone,

00:01.563 00:01.965 00:03.066 please take your seats.

00:01.966 00:03.165 00:03.165 You heard the bell.

00:03.166 00:04.068 00:04.366 You know what it means.

00:04.167 00:04.367 00:04.367 Last week,

00:04.368 00:06.971 00:07.569 the assignment was to write

00:07.070 00:07.570 00:07.570 an essay about your family.

00:07.571 00:13.675 00:13.978 Who they...

00:13.776 00:14.076 00:17.981 (class) Are!

00:14.077 00:17.982 00:20.083 And what they...

00:18.080 00:20.084 00:22.385 (all) Mean to us!

00:20.182 00:22.386 00:22.386 Excellent droning.

00:22.484 00:23.086 00:23.586 So I want everyone

00:23.185 00:23.587 00:23.587 to take out their essays.

00:23.685 00:25.589 00:26.188 We're going to read them aloud

00:25.688 00:26.189 00:26.189 to the class right up here.

00:26.190 00:30.093 00:30.594 My mom says that me and my dad

00:30.192 00:30.692 00:30.692 have very healthy appetites.

00:30.693 00:38.301 00:38.301 My mom says my dad's eyes

00:38.400 00:38.800 00:39.102 are brown because he is

00:38.802 00:39.103 00:45.207 so full of sh...

00:39.201 00:45.208 00:46.110 (teacher) Brian!

As you can see, there are a few pairs of "Display Time" and "Clear Time" that make no sense:

00:00.763 and 00:00.763

00:03.165 and 00:03.165

00:04:367 and 00:04:367

00:07.570 and 00:07.570

and so on.

I am trying to figure out if there is an algorithm for showing closed captions with zero time difference between the Display Time and the Clear Time values. The pop-up captions sometimes appear on two or three lines, but so far I have not been able to get the algorithm for showing such captions. Apparently there should be something else, either some additional data, or the algorithm I don't understand, that makes the closed captions work well in the movie. MS Media Center shows captions very well and they stay on the screen long enough so that I can read them!

You the man!

Mark Johnson — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 13:04:47 GMT

This is some nice bit of coding! Thank you for the great write up and sharing the code. Keep up the good work.

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

H.M. — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 02:13:58 GMT

I have the similiar problem like Val's.

Closed caption doesn't show up on Media Center. The SearchAndView shows there are closed captions in the dvr-ms file.

The Display time and the Clear time is the same through the entire file.

What could be the problem?

Thank you in advance.

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Mehdi — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 21:51:01 GMT

Thank you for this! Works perfectly, But I was just curious to find out if there was a way to make the SearchAndView to work for lets say a .WMV with its SAMI file?

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

toub — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 22:07:07 GMT

Mehdi, glad you like it. One could certainly write an app to provide the same behavior for WMV/SAMI, but I haven't done so.

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Val — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 22:36:54 GMT

Stephen, I will appreciate any guidance you may have for me and others who experience the issue with the Display Time and Clear Time being the same. I want to write an SRT file generator, however I can't use the Clear Time information as it works now since some captions won't get displayed. I basically have to ignore the Clear Time and use only the Display Time information. Is there any better way? Since I use VBA for writing my applications and I don't have MS Visual Studio, I can't really do anything with your code.

Many thanks for creating and sharing your libraries, and any further advice you may have!

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

toub — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 01:14:12 GMT

Hi Val- As I mentioned, it's certainly possible that I have an error in my logic for parsing this stuff, but I haven't found it yet. I appreciate your providing the output results, but it's still hard for me to diagnose without the input DVR-MS, so that I can debug how I'm actually processing the closed captioning data. Regardless, I'm planning to release an updated version of the code; it's possible in doing so I'll stumble across the reason for why this is happening.

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

H.M. — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 00:25:04 GMT

Hi Stephen: If you need, I can send you the DVR-MS file that I recorded.

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

toub — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 01:20:17 GMT

Val provided me with a sample, thanks.

Character encoding

Joe Clark — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 22:27:59 GMT

You’re going to have some interesting errors pop up in character encoding, as I assure you that the character set in NTSC (changed twice, so there are actually three) does not map perfectly to US-ASCII.

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

toub — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 22:42:35 GMT

Yup. There are other problems with this approach, too; for example, I'm not paying any attention to position layout on the screen and how that affects ordering of characters/words/sentences/etc. But in most scenarios, with most of the text and styles used in most shows, it works just fine, and as it's purely a sample and experiment to show the types of things you can do with this, that's fine by me. If someone wants to take the time to create a more robust implementation, great.

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Murtuza — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 00:37:14 GMT

Is there any way to capture CC data from real time video stream, either DVD or TV on Line21.

In other words I need text data of the closed caption when i'm waching video.

Thanks in advance.

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

toub — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 02:20:36 GMT

I'm sure it's *possible*, for example through a DirectShow filter plugged into the filter graph, but I don't have a sample for doing so.

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Filiep Geeraert — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 18:03:16 GMT

I 'm really desperate on this.

What I want to do, is simply record a TV show, that has PAL Teletext subtitles in it, then play it back on another PC (a laptop for instance).

This laptop does not have Mediacenter installed on it, and it seems that any player I tried does not render the subtitles.

I tried Windows Mediaplayer, Windows Mediaplayer Classic, Zoomplayer, BSPlayer, Videolan (VLC), even GeexBox (Linux bootable CD).

All of them playback video and audio fine, but no subtitles.

Does anyone have a solution to this ?

I tried building a graph and extracting the teletext, but I 'm not really getting much readable data.

BTW : even the Medacenter PC itself only renders the subtitles when the DVR-MS file is being played from Mediacenter, not from Windows Media Player...

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Filiep Geeraert — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 18:34:18 GMT

For people interested in a Teletext subtitles extraction utility, have a look at my homepage.

I think it will only work with Teletext captured from analogue PAL broadcasts.

PAL Teletext subtitle ripper now available

Filiep Geeraert — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 18:36:08 GMT

Forgot to add the URL.

You can find my Teletext extraction utility at :

http://www.extrabuttons.net

Fun with DVR-MS: Link does not show article.

saliim — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 06:28:15 GMT

Was looking for the original article "Fun with DVR-MS". The link does not work. Could someone forward me to a valid link ?

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Filiep Geeraert — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 00:07:51 GMT

I always find it hard to read and adapt other people's code.

Is there anyone who could write a program which does the following :

1) Synchronously read a DVR-MS file of choice

2) write a dumpfile containing the 2nd stream (the one that contains the Teletext data, with a marker (for instance : <next frame>) at the beginning of each frame.

The reason I am asking is this :

My Teletext ripper program works quite well, the biggest problem I have though, is that I start with a dumpfile I create with graphedit.

When I create that dumpfile timing information is lost, so I then get the timings from the Teletext clock that is displayed in the upper hand corner.

However, this clock only has a 1 second accuracy, which is not accurate enough, especially for live subtitles.

So if I could start with the same dump file, but it would contain frame or time markers, I could get (almost) perfect timings !

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

kelvin wong — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 00:13:33 GMT

hello,

this is perfect tool for me, because I am deaf. of course, you aren't racist!!!!!

that is enough proof :), that is why I like Media Center (as love as my wife)

kelvin

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

badbob001 — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 01:22:19 GMT

Due to a driver bug in my capture card that will never be fixed, the closed captioning of recorded videos is two seconds ahead of the audio. How practical is it to update the closed captioning timecode in a dvr-ms to subtract two seconds? I'm not interested in converting dvr-ms to wma, just updating the cc data in the dvr-ms.

Thanks!

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

toub — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 02:44:37 GMT

The Fun with DVR-MS article is now on my blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/toub/archive/2007/09/22/fun-with-dvr-ms.aspx

Modifications to create .srt files.

Fnord — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 20:10:09 GMT

I've been looking for a way to convert dvr-ms into divx, playable on the Toshiba DVD player/recorder.

While I found some software to convert into playable divx, I miss the captioning.

Many divx players support a *.srt file (same name as the movie playing)

I found this wiki that provides an example and modified the code here to produce the required format.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubRip

So, in ExtractClosedCaptions.cs

From the comment line:

// Save the captions out to a faux-spreadsheet (tab-delimited text file with .xls extension)

string outputName = filename.Replace(".dvr-ms", ".srt");

using(StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(outputName))

int nCurrentIndex = 1;

{

foreach(NtscClosedCaption cc in ccs)

{

writer.WriteLine("{0}", nCurrentIndex++);

writer.WriteLine("{0} --> {1}", cc.StartTimecode, cc.ClearTimecode);

writer.WriteLine("{0}", cc.Text);

writer.WriteLine("");

}

Compile and run as before.

Closed Captioning on a SageTV PVR / HTPC - AllDeaf.com

Closed Captioning on a SageTV PVR / HTPC - AllDeaf.com — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 03:06:47 GMT

PingBack from http://www.alldeaf.com/deaf-products-technologies/48018-closed-captioning-sagetv-pvr-htpc.html#post891000

help required: H.264 sample streams with Closed captions

nurav — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 14:37:59 GMT

I desperately need some H.264 test streams which contains CC data. am done with the parsing nd decoding but am not able to verify content due to the lack of streams.. PLZ help..

email me if u have any at

amit0353@gmail.com

Actors, Actresses, and the Movies » Stephen Toub : DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:18:40 GMT

PingBack from http://actorsnotinmoviesblog.info/stephen-toub-dvr-ms-adventures-in-closed-captioning/

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

tleung — Thu, 29 May 2008 07:50:47 GMT

Downloaded the ClosedCaptions.zip file on to a machine with a fresh install of Vista Home Premium.

I tried ConvertToWmv, and it gave an exception.

Anyone else seen this ? I was able to run ConvertToWmv on a XP pro machine using the same dvr-ms file. Thanks.

C:\download\ClosedCaptions\Code\ConvertToWmv\bin\Debug>convertToWmv LifeToday.dvr-ms

Converting from LifeToday.dvr-ms to LifeToday.dvr-ms.wmv

0.00%

Unhandled Exception: Toub.DirectShow.DirectShowException: The operation completed successfully

at Toub.MediaCenter.Dvrms.Conversion.Converter.RunGraph(IGraphBuilder graphBuilder, IBaseFilter seekableFilter)

at Toub.MediaCenter.Dvrms.Conversion.AsfConverter.DoWork()

at Toub.MediaCenter.Dvrms.Conversion.Converter.Convert()

at Toub.MediaCenter.Tools.ConvertToWmv.Main(String[] args)

Adventures in Closed Captioning

Matt — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 04:27:27 GMT

Hope you can help. I have a TV Guardian that takes a CC signal to filter out curse words. Anyway to make Vista Media Center pass a normal CC signal through to the TV?

Thanks,

Matt

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Howard — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 05:25:56 GMT

I tried to extract CC from an HD recording dvr-ms file and get this error:

Unhandled Exception: Toub.DirectShow.DirectShowException: The input media format

is invalid. ---> System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0xC00D0BB8): Exce

ption from HRESULT: 0xC00D0BB8.

at Toub.DirectShow.IWMSyncReader.GetOutputFormatCount(Int32 dwOutputNum)

at Toub.MediaCenter.Dvrms.ClosedCaptions.ClosedCaptionsParser.FindStreamNumbe

r(IWMSyncReader reader, Guid streamTypeId)

at Toub.MediaCenter.Dvrms.ClosedCaptions.NtscClosedCaptionsParser.Parse(IWMSy

ncReader reader)

at Toub.MediaCenter.Dvrms.ClosedCaptions.ClosedCaptionsParser.GetCaptions()

--- End of inner exception stack trace ---

at Toub.MediaCenter.Dvrms.ClosedCaptions.ClosedCaptionsParser.GetCaptions()

at Toub.MediaCenter.Tools.ExtractClosedCaptions.Main(String[] args)

Is it because it's ATSC instead of NTSC? Can this tool handle ATSC recording files? Thanks.

re: DVR-MS: Some Mistakes You Made Stephen

tvmogul — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 15:23:39 GMT

You made a few mistakes Stephen.

What you wrote has almost no practical value because the main use of CC is to Closed Caption TV shows like infomercials.

Each half hour infomercial I own airs 3,000 to 7,000 times a month on every NBC, ABC, CBS, and FOX TV station and each show must be Closed Captioned.

Almost every Broadcast TV station in America accepts analog Betacam SP tape--that is the standard for 99% of the TV stations in AMerica.

Most TV shows and infomercials are edited in either Media 100, AVID, or Final Cut Pro on the Mac. In fact, NOBODY uses a Windows based PC in the production business.

So your article doesn't explain how to CC a Betacam SP tape from a non-linear editing system on the Mac.

BUT, your code can be used to do this! And I think it would benefit your readers to know how to IMPORT CC files you create into Adobe's AfterEffects on the MAc.

You can install AfterEffects on a PC to start and important your file into AfterEffects. AfterEffets composite video frame by frame and the top 1 pixel of each of your frames are the CC byte codes!

If you look at the top of each frame created in your program the grayish rectangles are the byte codes. Simply mask out everything but the top 1 pixel and combine with the file format you want for the Mac and VIOLA! you have a file that is Closed Captioned on Line 21 that can be imported in a Mac for editing.

You must have know that you can do this Stephen? Is it politically incorrect to talk abot the Mac in this forum?

You wrote a great piece of software!

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Kyuho — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 02:50:16 GMT

Hello,

I guess finally I've found a solution to capture Caption. I took me a long time to find this article.

I've tried to capture TV show with TV card on my Vista and XP PC but It was not easy.

I decided to buy ATI TV Wonder Card for only use on XP PC.

But I want to record CC from analog broadcasting with HDTV card on Vista PC.

To record CC, to search words and others on the article are all the things I've wanted TV card sortware to have .

Actually, as a normal user I cannot understand about the article at this time but I try to figure it out with help of the article.

Thank you very much.

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

MJ Hufford — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 05:04:19 GMT

I would love to take a look at your code and see if it could be modified to create a language filter for DVR-MS files in Vista MCE.

For example, you could create an XML file of "unapproved" words. When those words are found in CC, then the audio could be muted momemtarilly until the word has cleared the screen.

You could also show CC while the audio is muted and even replace the unapproved word with another less offensive one.

I know this is being done with hardware devices like "TV Guardian", but would love to see it as a service in Vista MCE...fully configurable by the user.

Any thoughts from the peanut gallery?

access violation error building a graph | keyongtech

access violation error building a graph | keyongtech — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 09:26:28 GMT

PingBack from http://www.keyongtech.com/2536630-access-violation-error-building-a

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

Bill — Sat, 09 May 2009 06:35:25 GMT

The link to the code doesn't appear to be working. Anyboady know a working one?

Thank you.

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

toub — Sat, 09 May 2009 19:46:16 GMT

Fixed. http://blogs.msdn.com/toub/attachment/470491.ashx

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

David — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 22:28:20 GMT

@Howard:

Line 21 for ATSC has a different GUID. If you change the GUID from : 670AEA80-3A82-11D0-B79B-00AA003767A7 to b88b8a89-b049-4c80-adcf-5898985e22c1 on line 16 of the file: Code\Toub.MediaCenter.Dvrms\DirectShow\AmMediaType.cs it starts working for ATSC High Def programs. Or you could add a new static variable if you want to use both old and new GUIDs.

re: DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning

troester — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 01:28:43 GMT

Toub,

CGood article. What happened with CC in DVDs in Windows 7 MC?