GOT it!! thanx for the help kris and other forum members!

Hello all

I have some experience getting closed captions on LD to work in Europe. And teletext.

Closed Captions and Teletext are similar, but not identical. In particular, although they both send the text information in the vertical blanking interval (VBI) between video frames, they use different lines to do so. The decoders built into TVs are for one system or the other, never both. External decoders may be able to handle both systems, but I've only ever tried them with CC.

There are no PAL LDs with Closed Captions. There are some PAL LDs with teletext subtitles however. They are usually continental (as opposed to UK) releases of US films that retain English on the audio track and have multiple language subtitles on teletext. LDDB allows us to search for them from the advanced search page. There are also a few UK releases that use Teletext. One example is the terrific "British Garden Birds" disc (see LDDB) (BBC, narrated by David Attenborough). It has loads of additional text information that one can browse though in quite a sophisticated way, using the four colour navigation buttons on one's tv remote, just like ordinary tv teletext, only much faster! The "text" button on a European tv will access teletext from LDs instantly with no additional hardware, just like US standard TVs access closed captions. It works for me, anyway. Now that analogue tv is a thing of the past here in the UK, this is the only way that we will ever see teletext (or Ceefax as we call it here) on our tv screen again!

Getting closed captions to appear on a European tv however requires an external cc decoder. It took me ages to find a suitable one. They do crop up fairly frequently on ebay in the US, but a lot of them have built-in tv tuners and internal power supplies. This renders them useless over here. The ones with built-in tuners usually have no external composite input, which we need for LD. Also, the internal power supply make them stupidly heavy (and therefore expensive to ship transatlantic) and one would have to use a separate step-down transformer too. Hopeless.

The best strategy is to look for a model that is tunerless and with an external power supply. Get the US seller to throw the power supply in a skip and use a standard variable voltage dc power supply of your own. (You would have to throw the original power supply away anyway or use a cumbersome step down tranformer which is just messy.) Just make sure you get the voltage and polarity right. Feed the composite signal from the LD into the CC decoder and thence to the tv. It doesn't matter whether the composite signal comes from the yellow RCA socket or through scart. Bypass any external video processors, because they usually strip off the VBI. A few decoders provide an s-video input, but that is a pointless extra expense in the case of LD. Mine is a BVS-CC100, made in Canada. It weighs only a few ounces and was therefore cheap to post. The manual's on the net, which will give you the polarity for the power supply.

There was at least one external cc decoder for the european market. Sarabec VR20. It sits neatly in the middle of a scart cable. I have one and it works a treat. Why a UK company should make a decoder for NTSC videos, I'm not sure, but at a guess it was for the deaf community (we're all heading that way). It might do teletext as well, but I haven't tried that and the manual doesn't mention it. VR20s are rare though, so my advice is to go for a North American one and ditch the power supply.

Even better, build your own! There are schematics out there, and the code for the programmable chips. The chips and boards cost pennies, and think how satisfying that would be. It's been done...

BR,

For the record: It was never a legal requirement in the US to have CC on LDs. Although almost everything mainstream does have them, a LOT of the niche stuff doesn't.

It did eventually became a legal requirement for TVs to have CC decoders in them, but that didn't happen until...I guess it must have been the mid 90s? Furthermore this was only required in sets that actually had tuners, so pro video monitors, projectors, etc don't usually have it.

Having written a slightly flippant sentence in a post about how easy it might be to make one's own CC decoder, I found this:
http://nootropicdesign.com/projectlab/2011/03/20/decoding-closed-captioning/

It's a kit, $30-odd, for general experimentation with video. CC decoding is just an easy introduction-level example!

You can stream it to your pc, you can overlap the captions on the video to watch films or you can extend it to automatically mute your tv whenever <your most hated celebrity> is mentioned.

I really do love the internet.

Sorry that I'm late to the thread. But since CC100s look pretty rare (or expensive) on the net, I thought I'd mention I have one sitting in the closet, if anyone's interested (Also have at least four other spare CC decoders, but I digress).

I need one that has S-vhs in and s-vhs out also preff 220 volt or a 110-220 switch version

Would a TV Guardian 301 fit the bill?

Is the Panasonic DMR-EZ48VK DVD/VCR combo recorder available in Europe? Because that makes for a really good CC decoder with S-Video inputs and S-Video, Component and HDMI output.

jep that should do the job! you got one for sale?

sure, send me a pm if you want it

Learn something new every day. I didn't realize that LD had CC. I just got it to work on my system although I had to bypass the upscaling of the video through my receiver. It wouldn't work even when I just passed the video signal through.

nllaserdiscnl, if you have a PC with a video capture card, you could decode the CC using Dscaler, a very good video processor software, and it's free!

I bought from Germany such second hand unit:
Hitachi Closed Caption Decoder VT-CCD1E
this works with my Pioneer DVL-919E LD very well.
NB! This CCD has only composite video in and out.
It decodes Closed Captions or Subtitles for the
Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (SDH) from all US and Japan NTSC laserdiscs
which are including them (even sometimes not marked).

BTW there are many Japanese LD-G laserdiscs which have English CC too (not mentioned at covers).

I currently don't have any PAL laserdiscs with CC or Teletext so
I haven't got possibility to test this format.
I can confirm that this CCD can't decode LD-G and/or CD+G format.

By the way if somebody will use LD player, Pioneer LD-G unit LG-1,
Pioneer Dolby AC-3 Decoder RFD-1 and also CC Decoder,
then Optical (Toslink SPDIF) Audio wiring shall be:
LD Player -> LG-1 -> RFD-1 -> Amplifier/Receiver
and Composite Video (RCA) wiring shall be:
LD Player -> LG-1 -> CCD -> Amplifier/Receiver

Here you can find scanned English pages from the VT-CCD1E User Manual (PDF):
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6oXNkX5k_6LWk5OUFJhZ0hybE0
It was too large (6MB) for forum attachment.

I want to buy external PAL TeleText (VideoText, TeleVideo) decoder with Remote.
Unit like NEC VX-101A or NEC TX-101NZ etc.
Needed is PAL unit with RCA - composite (or S-Video or SCART) in and out.
Can be also universal PAL/SECAM/NTSC external unit from 90ties.


Japanese NTSC units (NEC TX-1500; Fuijtsu-General TX-20/TX21) and US NABTS units (Panasonic TU-1000X) are not capable to decode PAL or WTS format.
Also I can't use special units paired with TV tuner or TV set (using TV remote) like: Sony TXT-100G; Grunding VT1000; JVC VU-V140E/V150E etc.

Thank you beforehand