Hi, some of my friends like when movies have subtitles and since quite a few NTSC LDs have captions, I though to get a decoder.

I bought a SoftTouch MagHubcap, connected it and got the captions, however, the people who were making the LD were very thoughtful and placed the captions in the black bars so they do not obscure the image. The problem - I have a widescreen TV and if I zoom the picture, I do not see the captions.

Now I am thinking of getting a character generator and using a PC to display the captions (the MagHubcap can output the captions with their control codes on a serial port). One of my LD players (CLD-V2300D) has a built-in character generator, the problem is that it only has 20 columns, but the standard requires 32 (meaning that it would be more difficult for me to convert the caption positions, though I guess I could just use the text and ignore the positions, something I will try before buying a character generator).

Do you use captions? How did you solve the problem of displaying them on a widescreen TV?

I think this is the situation you will have, they were made for 4.3 so you need to show a 4.3 image.

On my TV I do have an option to move the image up or down after I zoom but its too much hassle i never do it.
That may be your only option, or use a projector and shoot the 4.3 image just larger with the CC below.

You might need a decoder which gives you the option to freely move/position the subtitles on the screen.
I do not know which model offers this functionality, but I think I read somewhere that such an option exists.

I've seen some pretty inventive solutions on here for displaying CC on modern TVs, including one setup that featured two TVs and a mirror! I'm sure someone here will be able to find a way of making this work for you.

I'm thinking about getting an EVAL-ADV7625 board (it does not seem to be readily available though) - it should be able to add text overlay on the HDMI link between my scaler (Lumagen HDQ) and the TV. This would have the additional benefit of not messing up the deinterlacing of the HDQ like the normal captions do.

Maybe somebody knows of a different device that can add a simple text overlay on HDMI working at 1080p24/50/60. I should be able to program a PC to take the data from the CC decoder and feed it to the overlay generator.

My Ligitek CC Decoder can shift subtitles...but they don´t show up very often..also has a cartridge slot for subtitles.