It was about 80% accurate, but they discovered something interesting. Researchers Fred Popowich and Paul McFetridge at Simon Fraser University developed a “shake and bake” machine translation algorithm which could be implemented in hardware of the day. This was an interesting project on two fronts. One surprising application I stumbled upon was a small set top box designed to translate the English dialogue for Spanish speakers who liked to watch US daytime soap operas. Real-time translating from Spanish Popowich and McFetridge at Simon Fraser in 1998 In fact, we wrote about a similar project on Hackaday about ten years ago. Imagine a system designed to monitor a wall of televisions (or just tuners) equipped with CC decoders feeding the RS-232 text to a computer which is programmed to look for various key words and alert the staff when found. While his niche products were used in all kinds of systems, one that sticks in my mind is in news rooms. He is quite a character, a great story teller, and I learned a lot about the captioning industry from him. I enjoyed my phone calls with Doug over the years. Full Length ISA Card Closed Caption Decoder Most prized are two CCEPlus line 21 generator cards, the only full-length ISA cards I’ve ever owned, which have given me an excuse to keep a fully working Gateway 2000 486DX2-66V in my lab for over 15 years. They made various niche market CC products, and in fact, I still have several of his products today. Newsroom channel monitorsīack in the day, I discovered a small company called SoftTouch, Inc., “innovators in the obsolete” according to owner Doug Byrd. While I was immersed in the world of VBI data and closed captions for several years, I kept discovering applications that were not related to the intended use. Let’s start with some of the off-label uses of closed captioning and Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI) data. There were some great questions in the comments section from last time, hopefully I have answered most of these here. Today I want to jump into another fascinating chapter of the story: what happened to closed captions as the digital age took over? From peculiar implementations on disc media to esoteric decoding hardware and a baffling quirk of HDMI, it’s a fantastic story. I covered the difference between the two, and their backstory, in my previous article on the analog era of closed captions. Looking under the hood to see how this text is delivered is a fascinating story that stared with a technology called Closed Captions, and extended into another called Subtitles (which is arguably the older technology). When you want to read what is being said on a television program, movie, or video you turn on the captions.
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