Once upon a time Dave in Boston ~ shaped the electrons to say... > Sometimes the captions are available, sometimes they are not. I don't know > if this is a seperate signal stream that Tivo does/doesn't catch all the > time. I don't know if the Cable company doesn't encode it properly, etc.
The TiVo HD and Series3 have built-in CC decoders. Analog CC is encoded in the VBI of the video signal. Digital CC is a data stream simulcast with the digital signal. They'll handle both. The Series1/2 are analog only, of course, and they record the closed caption signal and then re-merge it on playback for the TV to decode. > There are times when CC is avilable on live TV...but when playing back the > tivo recording it is not available. Is this with the built in decoder or an external decoder? > I find that the Unbox downloads have no captions available. Amazon doesn't caption Unbox downloads, that's not TiVo. > I think Closed Captioning is an afterthought for Tivo.... That's very much not the case. TiVo does more than most DVRs to make sure CC works. Since the MPEG-2 encoding could destroy the CC data (MPEG-2 is lossy), the TiVo splits out the CC data and stores it separately to make sure it is preserved, then it re-embeds the CC data in the VBI for playback. Since day one they've done work specifically to keep CC intact and functional, more than many other DVRs. -MZ -- megazone-at-megazone.org http://www.MegaZone.org/ Gweep, Geek, Human, me. http://www.TiVoLovers.com/ http://www.Eyrie-Productions.com/ -><- Hail Eris "A little nonsense now and then, is relished by the wisest men" 508-852-2171
