New video time!
A whole lot of folks keep forgetting about closed captions on DVDs, and as time has marched on this means they're getting less accessible.
@TechConnectify i actually found that some of my DVDs don't even have captions! and it's not like some unheard of show, i noticed it on House MD!
@dysfun Ah, but they might! There's a good chance they don't have a subtitle track, but they may have closed captions.
@TechConnectify
Gods I remember how cool all the little special features on DVDs used to be. Blueray too. It is so strange how far we've allowed our media to degrade.
Now we have to fight tooth and nail just for basic closed captions... :<
@TechConnectify hmmm, I was thinking that all DVDs have awful bitmaps as subtitles.
@TechConnectify I don't know anybody that actually buys DVDs any longer!
@TechConnectify I learned things!
Things that I have zero use for.
But then again, I know how DOS interrupts work.
@TechConnectify ooo accessibility things? Love learning stuff about that! <3
@TechConnectify That is actually my favorite video of yours so far, very fascinating! And that's saying something because your videos are generally great.
@TechConnectify This video inspired me to buy the Perry Mason box set. I’ve seen just about all the episodes available on streaming, but there are so many missing episodes!
@TechConnectify thank you for that video. And OMG, all this time I had assumed that HDMI actually provisioned some kind of auxiliary data channel for a counterpart to the line 21 data. But a quick glance over the standard, and… it does in fact not. What the heck?
Goes to show, that I'm not a very active consumer of "television" and alike content.
@TechConnectify
I've always hated the stupid video overlay style of closed captions. How much easier it would've been if all DVD and Blu-ray players rendered text captions instead.
@TechConnectify It's great to see some TV technology again. House appliances just don't excite me much.
@TechConnectify And this is where everyone outside the US is discovering that closed caption isn't just a US linguistic term for what we call subtitles in the rest of the world...
Great video, as always.
@dat The few bluray discs I own are really enshittyfied... I bought a few and they're a pain to watch through a BD drive and VLC.
@TechConnectify
@TechConnectify An accessibility feature that is not accessible? How novel! I'm glad someone is trying to raise awareness for this, especially since we still have a long ways to go before physical media disappears despite what the young'uns and Silicon Valley folks seem to think.
@TechConnectify I'd say it might be worth a message to whatever government ministry is in charge of accessibility, but at this point I'd be afraid that it would just get upper management to speed up the demise of optical media.
@TechConnectify You sent me down this rabbit hole too. I've written several MPEG2-TS decoders in my career, and when I was watching this video, I assumed they'd used another PID in the TS stream on the DVD. Turns out it is stored in the video stream. And not in line 21. There is additional data in the MPEG2 elementary video stream that has the EIA-608 data in it. To prove this, I got an old DVD, decrypted the VOBs, used ffmpeg to extract ONLY the video stream, and then passed that to ccextractor to see if it could find captions, and it worked!
I also tried MakeMKV (A popular archiving tool) to see what it thinks. Even though you can see in the screenshot it recognizes the CC stream separate from the subtitles, it strips them from the MPEG2 ES stream it puts into the mkv file (proved by extracting the m2v from the mkv, passing that to ccextractor, which finds to closed captioning)
@TechConnectify My parents' dvd player from 2003 can display line 21 captions on screen. However, the option is hidden-- you must press a button labeled navi which brings up a large menu of options separate from the normal settings menu, including the one to display closed captions. Also, some disks' closed captions are decoded incorrectly, so that captions are never erased from the screen, and new captions layer on top of older ones.
@TechConnectify I wonder if there’s a different handling on this depending on the region - I’m in Brazil and pretty much all content here (local or foreign) includes subtitles here - didn’t check CCs, will take a look at this later.
Also: I’m currently working on archiving our home DVD collection to our NAS - approx. 200 titles, cloning the discs using Brasero on my Linux laptop - then I’ll replace Plex with Jellyfin to be able to watch them via streaming.
@TechConnectify The current episode of @radiolab is a fun accidental companion piece to this video.
@TechConnectify No one seems to have mentioned Youtube Subtitles hacking yet: https://youtu.be/NEDFUjqA1s8 If you want to actually do cool stuff with Youtube subtitles, the video is well worth a watch.
@dat Technology-wise they should be better as, IIRC, they are more like PNGs than simple bitmaps with a color to represent alpha. At the same time, seems the additional possibilities mostly made it easier to companies make worse subtitles.
they should instead have embedded a font and fixed encoding to utf8
that would solve more problems and would enable different usages of that data
maybe add images too - but never only images!
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@TechConnectify interesting
My experience with DVB-SUB is that VLC sucks at that too. Even teletext rendering, which to be fair it does support, it doesn’t do all that well…
As for preservation, it is absolutely possible to put CTA-708 (which can wrap CTA-608) into an H.264 NAL unit in a similar way to how it can be embedded in MPEG-2 but I have no clue if people are doing this!
The good news is that guess is that I still work with CTA-608/708 quite a bit when writing software for broadcasters so… the knowledge is at least still out there
(Yes, EIA-608 got renamed to CTA-608 a while ago - it’s a bit of a rabbit hole!)
@TechConnectify I usually whenever I rip a DVD on MakeMKV try to include the captioning data from the disc which has the closed captioned data enclosed in the file, so I can stream the files on Plex which will show the CC data in the subtitles function on an HDMI TV with no problem.
@TechConnectify I can confirm the PlayStation 5 has perfect closed captioning. (Please ignore my phone's inability to take decent photos of my TV.)
@TechConnectify I've been embarked on the "scanning all my disks before The Rot gets them" train for a while and have had to get very creative with extracting, OCR'ing, and reassembling bluray rips to make their subtitles compatible with home media servers to the point of writing software just to make it work.
Media companies have made preserving subs on physical collections very difficult for the sake of inconveniencing pirates (who often just dump them rather than dealing with it)