Hello,
I am reposting my comments to Jim from another thread per his suggestion. I am interested in finding out what is being done to make MC capable of decoding caption information. My post below from the thread "Re:Image handling -- feature requests
« Reply #71 on: June 28, 2004, 05:18:26 PM »"
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from: EpF on June 01, 2004, 11:19:17 PM
Display ‘captions’ in Playing Now (not sure what captions are, but it’s mentioned quite a bit)
Jim, Long time no speak, last I wrote to you was regarding some business development ideas I had for MC. :-)
Now I'm writing to answer your question specifically as it relates to captions, or more precisely "closed captions" as used on a TV, not to be confused with album captioning which seems to be also discussed in this thread (per EpF's comments).
Since I am a hearing-impaired viewer of television and have a long history of broadcast and postproduction credits, I feel somewhat qualified to help you understand the nature of what I believe is an important feature as discussed by DocLotus. I myself have tried to use captioning with MC 10.0.146 and it has been intermittent, jerky (when crop is off) and in the middle of the screen. Thus far the use of captioning with MC has been unreliable and unusable.
To be fair, I'm not sure if it is a hardware issue (I'm using Pinnacle's PCTV Deluxe) or software. If it is the latter, then I suspect that you should be able to provide captioning decoding and allow users to positiong where the caption is on the PC screen. At least that would be my wish.
FYI, there is a analog standard (EIA-608) and digital standard (EIA 708) that applies to the encoding and decoding of closed caption data for television viewing. With analog NTSC or SMPTE 259M, EIA-608 caption data is supplied on line 21 of the VBI. With HD-SDI, (SMPTE 292M), caption data is supplied as part of the digital serial bitstream, typically on line 9. So if you are serious about providing captions as a benefit of MC, then you will need to decode both; though EIA-708 is still nascent and there aren't any digital decoders on the market yet (might be a biz dev idea for you).
Anyhow, I'm writing to see if you could provide a general or specific idea about what your plans are to provide reliable and usable closed caption decoding for tv viewing via MC. Inquiring minds would like to know.
Overall, I LOVE MC and recommend it every chance I get!!!
Kind Regards, D.
