What was the model you got, publius?

It is literally just called "Closed Caption Decoder". In addition to that, it says "Universal" on the front, which is a reference to the maker, Universal Security Instruments of Owings Mills, Maryland. The sticker on the bottom says "FCC ID: AXNV7300 / MODEL: V-7300", & it is made in China. It's a little black box about 6 inches square & 2 inches high, with a grey button & a red LED on the front. On the back are 3 switches, "CAPTION/TEXT" "LANGUAGE L1/L2" "CHANNEL OUT 3/4", 4 RCA jacks for video & mono audio in/out, & two F connectors for RF in/out.

Maybe this is a dumb questions as I haven't used CC in ages, but can't the TV just decode the CC signal of anything with CC?

The very same.

Data projectors & the like often don't decode CaptionVision, & if you are going to scale the video, in general you need to decode the captions first, because the scaling will strip out the caption information, & anyway nothing decodes CC from a non-525/30i source.

This is probably a stupid question, but I assume it leaves you with the typical giant black bars 15% up the screen?

It basically puts up a black box with white letter text in it. That's some kind of industry standard, which it's very difficult to get around.

So, if anyone's curious, I did finally find a CC decoder with a transparent background.

It's the TV Guardian Model 101. It's supposed to be a language filter, but you can set the filter off and captions to "always on."

It has a composite RCA in, composite RCA out and RF out

Found another solution for Closed Captioning. Picked up a Panasonic DMR-EZ48VK VCR/DVD recorder for cheap off of craigslist. Turns out it not only has CC capabilities, but pretty extensive options for it: font size, font style, text color, text opacity, background color, background opacity (the transparent setting makes the background basically invisible!)

Only problem I've run into is that the CCs are set to the left rather than centered.

Still, I like these captions better than the built in CC in my WEGA TV!

According to Panasonic's website, this unit is longer being made, so if you're thinking about it, get it now!

How's the comb filter?

Not as well as I hoped. Using the trusty Snell & Wilcox moving orb, does pretty well with dot crawl but doesn't do much with cross color. Orb is always giving off rainbows moving or stationary.

Still, running the R7G with composite through this recorder and connected to the WEGA via component--the picture was still decent.

Thanks for the tip regarding the TV Guardian 101. Used models can be found reasonably cheap, and work great as a cc decoder. I really like how the unit displays the captions against a mostly transparent background rather than large blocks of black.

When using the TV Guardian, I cannot notice any alteration/degradation to the overall video image. However, being the paranoid video geek that I am, I ran one composite line from my LD player via the TV Guardian to a switchbox. Then ran another composite line straight from the LD to the switchbox. Now I can engage or dis-engage the captions into the video stream at the push of a button (on the switchbox). This is a neat trick for those that have two composite video outs on their LD player.

I admit to doing this myself. It gets REALLY complicated when I am running a CC decoder plus a computer-driven genlock! Two switchboxes, one for THROUGH - GENLOCK - CAPTION to the projector, one to feed either the genlock or the CC decoder…