Feature request: Closed Caption support

[gambitz]

I would like to request Closed Captioning support. No this is not the same as subtitles or Subtitled for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (SDH).

Closed Caption is quite common in older DVDs and TV Season DVDs without English Subtitles. I have tons of movies that have closed captioning but NO SUBTITLES. I would like the ability to turn them on.

This is also needed for recorded TV with CC metadata.

I think the firmware will need a way to extract the VBI (Vertical Blanking Interface) code and then convert it to bitmap overlay so it can be carried through HDMI.

Please see attached link for further information on CC and HDMI issues.

http://www.hdmi.org/learningcenter/faq.aspx#117

Thanks.

[RoofingGuy]

Even if WD looks into this, decides it is feasible, and decides to implement captioning support for any digital streams that contain caption information, it would be some time before you’d see this released (development, testing…).

As a possible work-around, to get captions available to you now, since who knows when/if this would ever be implemented, you can recode the DVD’s to .mkv with Handbrake.

You can turn the CC stream into an embedded subtitle stream.

I usually include both the “subtitles” and the “closed captions” when I make my rips.

In this case, I’d “add” stream 1 (the English subs) and stream 3 (the English CC):

[gambitz]

Thank you very much for replying with excellent suggestion. However I am familiar with Handbrake and I tested it few months ago. The problem I have with Handbrake converting CC to Subs is that it loses postional information.

It is extremely helpful to the deaf and hard of hearing when the subs algin to the left or to the right, etc to identify who is speaking what?

When there are two persons speaking (rapidly) on the screen and the subs only appear on the middle will confuse me on who spoke what? Or in this case see screenshot below. You could not see both faces but I know that the black guy at the far end spoke first because his text is higher. I know he spoke it because it’s on the right. Then the white guy replied. See left text. Handbrake doesnt preserve this formatting. All goes into middle of screen.

(An Unfinished Life)

Yes this concern should be dealt with Handbrake developers. However, I am asking WD if they could implement this feature so I dont have to encode ALL of my DVDs. There are alot of people like my parents who dont know how to encode DVDs.

[gambitz]

This one post here discussed that WD Live Hub does not show CC from several formats.

http://community.wdc.com/t5/General-Discussions/Movies-Freeze/m-p/100464/highlight/true#M2229

" It does not play Closed Captions from mpg, ts and trp videos"

TS is common with recorded TV which only uses CC not subs. So please seriously consider support CC so more people can benefit from this product.

Thanks.