On Thursday 24 February 2005 0:50, Max Waterman wrote:
Joseph A. Caputo wrote:
I don't want to come off as insensitive here, but... how about someone who was hearing impaired, and couldn't time shift programs from digital cable because they lose the subtitles embedded in the MPEG stream if they convert it to analog.
My mpeg streams have subtitles embedded? That would be awesome, if true. How can I play them?
My mpegs are from a ReplayTV...will they still have subtitles?
Well, MPEGs *can* have subtitle information embedded, AFAIK. Whether or not a particular content producer embeds them is another story. Right now I don't think Myth supports MPEG subtitles, but the point is the information *should* be there and accessible by standard consumer devices**... perhaps someone familiar with the Americans with Disabilities Act could shed some light.
-JAC
**by 'standard' devices I mean that the information needs to be accessible in a standard way, such that someone could manufacture a single device capable of reading it, regardless of who your cable provider is. Right now, with analog television/cable, that standard is to transmit the information on a certain lines of the VBI. The sensible standard for digital television would be to embed the information in the MPEG stream, which would required unencrypted access to the digital data to decode the subtitles.
Hrm. Even though I had 'digital cable' when I recorded the shows, I think many of the channels were actually still transmitted in analogue - mostly those below channel 100, IIRC. The main exception for me is the reason I signed up for digital - BBC America - which, I am fairly sure, was transmitted as digital. In any case, my ReplayTV only had RCA phono connections to the cable box (using a IR channel changer to control it) so even the digital channels will be recorded as if there were analogue. So, if the subtitles (or closed captions, or whatever they call it in the US) are embedded in the mpeg stream, then I will have likely lost them in translation, so to speak - *unless* they re-encode them into the video signal (which I assume is what you mean by VBI).
I assume the ones recorded from the analogue channels will have also recorded the video lines with the subtitles in?
I wonder if channels recorded in the UK will have the CEEFAX info in them too - is CEEFAX still available in the UK (it's been a while since I lived there)?
Max. _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
