[mythtv-users] Solved: CC (and maybe Teletext) to DVD

[faginbagin]

OK, so I've got a solution for the one feature I wanted that MythTV 
didn't provide "out of the box." namely, the ability to burn recordings 
to DVDs with closed captions.

My question is: Is anyone else interested?

If so, I'm willing to do some extra work to make it available. At a 
minimum, tar'ing up the source and providing a README and web page 
explaining how to use it and how it works.

If not, I'll just keep it to myself.

There are a couple of details that might affect interest:

- It only works with recordings made with the IVTV driver, the one used 
by Hauppauge analog cards. FWIW, I have a PVR-150.

- It uses a library called libzvbi, which is part of this project:
http://zapping.sourceforge.net/
libzvbi is available as a debian package in the debian and ubuntu 
repositories, and probably many other repositories, too.

- libzvbi supports PAL Teletext, probably better than NTSC CC, so 
there's a good chance my little utility will work with teletext, too. Of 
course, I haven't tested it, but would be willing to, if I can get a 
hold of some PAL recordings that have VBI data. Or, perhaps someone else 
in PAL land would like to do the work?

- It converts IVTV encoded VBI data into DVD subtitles. It takes 
advantage of the fact that libzvbi can produce .png renderings of 
CC/Teletext and then uses spumux to convert the .png files into DVD 
subtitles. I think the results are better than other solutions based on 
using spumux to encode text based subtitles. The results look like what 
you're used to seeing on your TV, including support for italics, and 
special characters used in Spanish & French, as well as the musical 
note. I should mention that getting those special characters requires 
patching libzvbi source.

- I'm pretty sure it won't work if you like to cut commercials out of 
your recordings. That's because of the timestamp data I use to tell 
spumux where to add subtitles to the MPEG stream.

- I've worked around the above problem by tweaking mytharchive's 
mythburn.py to add chapter marks at the commercial marks found by 
mythcommflag.

I could go into more details, but I'll save that for documentation I 
will write if there's interest.

So, let me know if you're interested.

And if you are, can you tell me if you are comfortable compiling source 
and installing the results by hand without benefit of a configure 
script? I ask because, right now, I've got a really simple Makefile that 
doesn't even have an install rule. If there's enough interest from folks 
who need a "turnkey" process, I'll need more time to figure out how to 
use automake/configure and perhaps how to generate a binary debian package.