Closed Captioning-Open Source Style?

underwhelm asks: "My partner works for a company that provides closed-captions for all things NTSC. Their current, DOS-based software drags on their productivity, and moving to a fully windowed environment makes sense. This, as you can imagine, is a tiny field. There are only a few sources that have solutions, and they cost upwards of $10,000 per station. Is it possible that, for a similar capitol investment, they could retain some developers and create an Open Source solution to their problem?" Anything is possible...you just have to put your mind to it. Would anyone like to help out? (Hint: your e-mail address would be nice!)

"The program would require certain capabilities: video capture, caption encoding and decoding, MPEG-2 compliance (including various DVD-related abilities such as proper directory structure), and keyboard control of external VCRs.

How broad is current developer support for video capture and editing in Open Sourced OSes? How much of this project already exists in the ether? What would be the magic number of programmers to throw at a problem like this, and is it even feasible for an 'small-cap' company in a non-programming industry to tackle such an endeavor?

One thing that the company has experience in is obtaining grants. Tangentially, are there grants to be obtained for contributing to Open Sourced projects? "

Re:sorta OT, but I always wondered....

[GeorgeH]

Intel did this a few years back, I think '95 or '96. They sold TV tuner cards that would give you web pages from the scanlines. They had MTV and PBS lined up to send relevent web pages with their shows, but it never caught on. TV tuner cards have never been hot sellers, they wind up being more niche devices, that's probably what killed them.
--

Re:sorta OT, but I always wondered....

[eMBee]

good question,
european tv stations make a lot of use of this, you get about a thousand pages (80x40 i think) of text with all kinds of information,
when coming to the US i was really disappointed at the low quality of service of US tv.

greetings, eMBee.
(why is there no hint to these topics on the front page? a one-linwer would be fine)
--

hmm..

[Zurk]

broadcast 2000 for linux has a lot of those capabilities..you might want to contact those guys and see if they can be hired.

sorta OT, but I always wondered....

[MessiahXI]

Why has text simul-casting not progressed any past closed captions? It would seem to me that with the downstream bandwidth that coaxial provides (which would have been plenty, even 10 years ago), and a compliant television (manufacturers would have to participate) cable companies could have been streaming texted based multi-lingual captions, weather info, news headlines, etc etc, along side of their regular programming for years now. Any one have a clue?

--MessiahXI
Oh, and uhh,... first post... i guess.

Department

[noweb4u]

Shouldn't this department be:
(cc)-for-the-hearing-impaired dept?

This may be off topic, but it is worth noting :-)

Oh well.

[underwhelm]

I'm sort of disappointed this didn't get posted on the main page... But whatever.

From what I understand, the new DTV standard, as it currently exists, has piss-poor captioning support. With the magical expansion of OTA bandwith and computers running all of our TVs, I see no reason that some decent client-side text formatting, fonts etc couldn't have been included in the spec--Instead (CC) will barely evolve.

Unfortunately my knowledge of this is third-hand.

Thanks for your responses.

Closed Captioning-Open Source Style?

[jwitt]

I am in the process of starting a non-profit company to create open source software to benefit people with disabilities. The company is currently focusing on software for visually impaired users, but I have some familiarity with captioning technology. Please email me so we can discuss this in more detail. Jeff witt_jeff AT h-o-t-m-a-i-l DOT com