Sunday, April 12, 2009

SageTV 6.5.13 Beta Brings Closed Captioning

The team at SageTV continues their constant stream of new beta releases for SageTV 6.5.  A little over a week ago they released 6.5.13 which added closed captioning to its list of treasured features along with several additional new features and bug fixes.

My favorite new feature is Closed Captioning Support which has been one of the more requested features along with the subtitle support they added in 6.5.12.  In this build closed captioning only works on the HD Theater (HD200), LAN placeshifters and the MacClient.  Here's a screen-shot of the menu item (using SageMC add-on) and another one of the closed captioning in action

The SageMC Options Menu Shows Captioning Options

Dollhouse with Closed Captioning

While I probably won't use this feature all that much, it will be very nice for those that are hearing impaired as well as for those who need to turn down the sound at certain times.  I'll use it to show sports when I have company over but want to play music while the game is on.  I tried this out with my Hauppauge PVR500 tuner and SilconDust HDHR tuners.  It could work with the Hauppauge HD-PVR also, but since Hauppauge hasn't added that feature via a driver update, the HD-PVR doesn't support closed captioning yet.

 

Here's a few highlights from this beta release:

  • Closed Captioning Support! (EIA-608 style) For the HD200, LAN placeshifters and the MacClient. (placeshifters and MacClient only support NTSC currently, they'll be adding ATSC/QAM shortly; the HD200 already does all of them; and this has always been possible on the PC version on Windows, it just wasn't exposed by default) - requires beta firmware update on the HD200.  Closed Captioning support for other SageTV devices will be added in future beta updates.
  • Added support for IDX/VobSub external subtitle files with SageTVPlayer
  • Several bug fixes for subtitle support (subtitle support was just added in the last beta release)
  • Picture viewer: when entering this menu, delay starting next image preloading thread if not in a slideshow so the next image is not almost immediately preloaded.
  • Many additional bug fixes

Read more and get the Download at SageTV

SageTV HD Theater (STP-HD200) Beta firmware version "20090403 0" is also now available

Changes for beta version 20090403 0 include the following:

  • Added BD subpictures partial support
  • Added closed captioning support
  • Fix aspect ratio bug
  • Fix google video top 100
  • Fix embedded SSA decoding
  • Fix tiff image decoding
  • Updated some Showtime podcast feeds

For more info on the SageTV HD Theater beta firmware head over to the SageTV Forums