EIA-608 , also known as "Line 21 captions" and "CEA-608", is a standard for closed captioning for NTSC TV broadcasts in the United States , Canada and Mexico . It was developed by the Electronic Industries Alliance and required by law to be implemented in most television receivers made in the United States.
52-642: It specifies an "Extended Data Service", which is a means for including a VCR control service with an electronic program guide for NTSC transmissions that operates on the even Line 21 field, similar to the TeleText based VPS that operates on line 16 which is used in PAL countries. EIA-608 captions are transmitted on either the odd or even fields of Line 21 with an odd parity bit in the non-visible active video data area in NTSC broadcasts, and are also sometimes present in
104-481: A sharp . A command to display a special character has a first byte of 0x11 or 0x19 (depending upon channel). The second byte is a code point in the range 0x30–0x3F as follows. TM is short for unregistered trademark and should be represented in superscript (like the Unicode character U+2122 ™ TRADE MARK SIGN ). TS in the table above represents a "transparent space" or non-breaking space . Finally,
156-414: A "database layer" that utilizes either proprietary functions or a commercial off-the-shelf embedded database system for sorting, storing and retrieving programming data. SMPTE 259M SMPTE 259M is a standard published by SMPTE which "describes a 10-bit serial digital interface operating at 143/270/360 Mb/s." The goal of SMPTE 259M is to define a serial digital interface (based on
208-508: A French or Spanish translation of an English-speaking TV show. Raw EIA-608 caption byte pairs are becoming less prevalent as digital television replaces analog. ATSC broadcasts instead use the EIA-708 caption protocol to encapsulate both the EIA-608 caption pairs as well as add a native EIA-708 stream. EIA-608 has had revisions with the addition of extended character sets to fully support
260-400: A H.262 GOP header is as follows (the same would apply after an ISO/IEC 14496-2 GOP header): bslbf: bit string, left bit first ; uimsbf: unsigned integer, most significant bit first Caption blocks are inserted after the sequence and GOP headers, so each block is for one second of video which would end up being one or two long lines or three to four short lines of text. Also that means if
312-471: A button on the remote and the receiver tuned to the show they wanted to watch. This unit also had a single button recording function, and controlled VCRs via an infrared output. Available in North America, it was the first commercially available unit for home use that had a locally stored guide integrated with the receiver for single button viewing and taping. A presentation on the system was given at
364-406: A computer within its headend facility to present that data to subscribers in a format customized to the system's unique channel lineup. The EPG Channel would later be renamed Prevue Guide and go on to serve as the de facto EPG service for North American cable systems throughout the remainder of the 1980s, the entirety of the 1990s, and – as TV Guide Network or TV Guide Channel – for the first decade of
416-427: A decoder does a 3:2 pull-down for NTSC output the captions will remain in sync. The packet-ed structure that is inserted before the H.222 video packet is as follows for a frame of associated video: bslbf: bit string, left bit first ; uimsbf: unsigned integer, most significant bit first This structure was designed for any digital VBI data and was optimized to carry three or more 43-byte Teletext packets. e.g.
468-470: A digitally displayed, non-interactive menu of programming scheduling information shown by a cable or satellite television provider to its viewers on a dedicated channel. EPGs are transmitted by specialized video character generation (CG) equipment housed within each such provider's central headend facility. By tuning into an EPG channel, a menu is displayed that lists current and upcoming television shows on all available channels. A more modern form of
520-402: A later addition to the standard and their decoding is optional. EIA-608 provides controls for the color of the foreground and background of the text, underlining, blinking, and italics. The default color scheme is white characters on a black background, all opaque. The Transparent Space special character implies a transparent background even in the absence of any background control commands. As
572-402: A midrow code these are as follows: Bits 14, 13, 10, 9, 6 and 4 are always 0, bits 12, 8 and 5 are always 1. Bits 3, 2 and 1 form the color attribute 0001X10X(see the listing of attributes). Bit 0 indicates underline. For other control codes these are as follows: Bits 14, 13, 9, 6 and 4 are always 0, bits 12, 10 and 5 are always 1. Bit 8 chooses between Line 21 and 284. Bits 3, 2, 1 and 0 identify
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#1732798712696624-549: A page header and two associated lines. For Teletext subtitles, the data_unit_id is set to 3. In this form, captions have to be separated into byte pairs spread over frames in one second of video rather than grouped into one block as with the DVD structure. The same is true for Teletext subtitles with more than one line of text. The packet-ed structure that is inserted before the SMPTE 259M active video frame or MXF essence video packet
676-635: A span of seven or 14 days. Data used to populate an interactive EPG may be distributed over the Internet , either for a charge or free of charge, and implemented on equipment connected directly or through a computer to the Internet. Television-based IPGs in conjunction with Programme Delivery Control (PDC) technology can also facilitate the selection of TV shows for recording with digital video recorders (DVRs), also known as personal video recorders (PVRs). In 1981, United Video Satellite Group launched
728-408: A variety of information about the transmission. It is all optional,: There are three sets of characters that the EIA-608 stream can direct the receiver to display: basic characters, special characters, and extended characters. A single two-byte EIA-608 command (represented by a single VBI line) can specify two basic characters, one special character, or one extended character. Extended characters are
780-657: Is a character set reference in the range 0x24-0x2A as follows Bits 15 and 7 are always odd parity bits. Bit 11 is always the channel bit. Preamble address code with masking bit 15,11 and 7 as already defined above can be interpreted from following table The row bits specify which of the fifteen screen rows should contain the caption text: row 11 (0000), 1 (0010), 2 (0011), 3, 4, 12, 13, 14, 15, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10 (1111). The attributes bits allow 16 possibilities, which are: white (0000), green, blue, cyan, red, yellow, magenta, italics, indent 0, indent 4, indent 8, indent 12, indent 16, indent 20, indent 24, indent 28 (1111). For
832-463: Is a code point (identifies the character to display), as follows. The code is almost identical to ASCII; the exceptions are shown in red. In the table, SB represents a solid block. The apostrophe (code 27), which may originally have been intended to be a neutral apostrophe as in ASCII, is recommended to be rendered as a right single quotation mark (Unicode U+2019). For a neutral single quote/apostrophe,
884-465: Is a code point in the range 0x20-0x3F is as follows SM is short for service mark and should be represented in superscript (like Unicode character U+2120 ℠ SERVICE MARK ). The single quote mark is a curly left and double quote marks are curly left and right. The plus signs refer to top left, top right, lower left and lower right corners for box drawing . When used all standard and extended character sets are unused in favor of
936-568: Is built into almost all modern receivers for digital cable, digital satellite , and over-the-air digital broadcasting . They are also commonly featured in digital video recorders such as TiVo and MythTV . Higher-end receivers for digital broadcast radio and digital satellite radio commonly feature built-in IPGs as well. Demand for non-interactive electronic television program guides – television channels displaying listings for currently airing and upcoming programming – has been nearly eliminated by
988-486: Is coded as follows for a frame of associated video: bslbf: bit string, left bit first ; uimsbf: unsigned integer, most significant bit first This structure was designed for any digital audio or metadata that is to be synchronized with a video frame. SDI transports every eight bits in a 10 bit aligned packet, unlike MXF which is byte aligned and the ancillary flag bytes are replaced by 128 bit header. The EIA-608 data stream format includes Extended Data Service (XDS),
1040-577: Is one of the UK's largest and oldest EPG producers, dating back to 1996 and currently in partnership with Humax and Skyworth . Scandinavia also is a highly innovative EPG market. Even in Italy , the EPG penetration is relatively high with 38%. In France , IPTV is the main driver of EPG developments. In contrast to many other European countries, Germany lags behind, due to a relatively slow digitization process and
1092-542: The Eighth note (♪) is used to denote singing or background music in captions. These extended character sets are rarely used due to most European countries using the BBC Ceefax based Teletext system. The Ceefax system is more prone to character errors due to the greater number of data bits (337 versus 16) encoded per VBI field, these errors occur either on noise prone analog transmissions or connections. The second byte
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#17327987126961144-515: The Middle East and Asia . Some IPG systems built into older set-top boxes designed to receive terrestrial digital signals and television sets with built-in digital tuners may have a lesser degree of interactive features compared to those included in cable, satellite and IPTV converters; technical limitations in these models may prevent users from accessing program listings beyond (at maximum) 16 hours in advance and complete program synopses, and
1196-514: The picture user data in ATSC transmissions . It uses a fixed bandwidth of 480 bit/s per Line 21 field for a maximum of 32 characters per line per caption (maximum four lines) for a 30 frame broadcast. The odd field captions relate to the primary audio track and the even field captions related to the SAP or secondary audio track which is generally a second language translation of the primary audio, such as
1248-529: The vertical blanking interval of analog television video signals) to distribute listings data to IPG-enabled consumer receiving equipment. In Europe, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) published standard ETS 300 707 to standardize the delivery of IPG data over digital television broadcast signals . Listings data for IPGs integrated into digital terrestrial television and radio receivers of
1300-494: The 1990 IEEE consumer electronics symposium in Chicago . In June 1988 a patent was awarded that concerned the implementation of a searchable electronic program guide – an interactive program guide (IPG). TV Guide Magazine and Liberty Media established a joint venture in 1992 known as TV Guide On Screen to develop an EPG. The joint venture was led by video game veteran, Bruce Davis, and introduced an interactive program guide to
1352-534: The 21st century. In 1986 at a trade show in Nashville , STV/Onsat, a print programming guide publisher, introduced SuperGuide, an interactive electronic programming guide for home satellite dish viewers. The system was the focus of a 1987 article in STV Magazine . The original system had a black-and-white display, and would locally store programming information for around one week in time. A remote control
1404-550: The DigiCable series of set top boxes from General Instrument shortly thereafter. See wiki on TV Guide for subsequent developments. Scientific Atlanta introduced the 8600X Advanced analog Set-top box in 1993 that included an interactive electronic program guide, downloadable software, 2-way communications, and pause/FF/REW for VCR-like viewing. Millions were deployed by Time Warner and other customers. In Western Europe , 59 million television households were equipped with EPGs at
1456-675: The EPG, associated with both television and radio broadcasting, is the interactive [electronic] programming guide (IPG, though often referred to as EPG). An IPG allows television viewers and radio listeners to navigate scheduling information menus interactively, selecting and discovering programming by time, title, channel or genre using an input device such as a keypad , computer keyboard or television remote control . Its interactive menus are generated entirely within local receiving or display equipment using raw scheduling data sent by individual broadcast stations or centralized scheduling information providers. A typical IPG provides information covering
1508-455: The EPG, rather than programming timers. The aspect of an IPG most noticed by users is its graphical user interface (GUI), typically a grid or table listing channel names and program titles and times: web and television-based IPG interfaces allow the user to highlight any given listing and call up additional information about it supplied by the EPG provider. Programs on offer from subchannels may also be listed. Typical IPGs also allow users
1560-879: The IPG such as media downloads, series recording and programming of the recordings for the IPG remotely; for example, IceTV in Australia enables TiVo-like services to competing DVR/PVR manufacturers and software companies. In developing IPG software, manufacturers must include functions to address the growing volumes of increasingly complex data associated with programming. This data includes program descriptions, schedules and parental television ratings , along with flags for technical and access features such as display formats, closed captioning and Descriptive Video Service . They must also include user configuration information such as favorite channel lists, and multimedia content. To meet this need, some set-top box software designs incorporate
1612-446: The ability to display grids and, in the case of DVRs intended for terrestrial use, the ability – with an Internet connection – to access listings and content from over-the-top services. A growing trend is for manufacturers such as Elgato and Topfield and software developers such as Microsoft in their Windows Media Center to use an Internet connection to acquire data for their built-in IPGs. This enables greater interactivity with
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1664-470: The caption_block_count is greater than 30 then the block contains both interleaved caption fields and one could devise the framing rate from the caption_block_count. However since the data is grouped together the framing rate will almost always be 30/1.001, unlike the ATSC method that inserts one byte pair for each field after the picture header making framing rates of 24/1.001 possible for HD content. Since when
1716-624: The end of 2008, a penetration of 36% of all television households. The situation varies from country to country, depending on the status of digitization and the role of pay television and IPTV in each market. With Sky as an early mover and the BBC iPlayer and Virgin Media as ambitious followers, the United Kingdom is the most developed and innovative EPG market to date, with 96% of viewers having frequently used an EPG in 2010. Inview Technology
1768-570: The first EPG service in North America , a cable channel known simply as The Electronic Program Guide . It allowed cable systems in the United States and Canada to provide on-screen listings to their subscribers 24 hours a day (displaying programming information up to 90 minutes in advance) on a dedicated cable channel. Raw listings data for the service was supplied via satellite to participating cable systems, each of which installed
1820-663: The following predefined sets, care must be taken to not emulate any control commands. This is an extension submitted to the CEC by Norpak who made a similar extension to the Teletext format for the Chinese market. The main use has been to provide double byte code point captioning to the Japanese, Taiwanese and South Korean markets. A command to switch character sets has a first byte of 0x17 or 0x1F (depending upon channel). The second byte
1872-407: The foreground of this character is a blank space, it really means a gap in the close caption text. In these examples This is used to either pad out the field line when no captions are sent or for the eXtended Data Service. A command with bits 13 or 14 on directs the receiver to display two basic characters at the current cursor position for the current mode (closed caption or text). Each character
1924-466: The format besides simple 608 to 708 inline conversions. EIA-608 defines four channels of caption information, so that a program could, for example, have captions in four different languages. There are two channels, called 1 and 2 by the standard, in each of the two fields of a frame. The channels are often presented to users numbered simply as CC1-2 for the odd field and CC3-4 for the even field. Due to bandwidth limitations on either field, CC1 and CC3 are
1976-462: The inability for the IPG to parse synopses for certain programs from the MPEG stream or displaying next-day listings until at or after 12:00 a.m. local time. IPGs built into newer television (including Smart TV ), digital terrestrial set-top box and antenna-ready DVR models feature on-screen displays and interactive guide features more comparable to their pay television set-top counterparts, including
2028-484: The market in late 1995 in the General Instrument CFT2200 set-top cable box. Leading competitors to TV Guide On Screen included Prevue Guide and StarSight Telecast. Telecommunications Inc, owner of Liberty Media, acquired United Video Satellite Group, owner of Prevue Guide, in 1995. TV Guide On Screen and Prevue Guide were later merged. TV Guide On Screen for digital cable set top boxes premiered in
2080-481: The minor role of pay television in that country. Interactive program guides are nearly ubiquitous in most broadcast media today. EPGs can be made available through television (on set-top boxes and all current digital TV receivers), mobile phones (particularly through smartphone apps ), and on the Internet. Online TV Guides are becoming more ubiquitous, with over seven million searches for "TV Guide" being logged each month on Google . For television, IPG support
2132-779: The number of tab offsets. Considering parity bit already ignored hex value have of 2 byte data is following command: Electronic program guide Electronic programming guides ( EPGs ) and interactive programming guides ( IPGs ) are menu-based systems that provide users of television , radio , and other media applications with continuously updated menus that display scheduling information for current and upcoming broadcast programming (most commonly, TV listings ). Some guides also feature backward scrolling to promote their catch up content. They are commonly known as guides or TV guides . Non-interactive electronic programming guides (sometimes known as "navigation software") are typically available for television and radio, and consist of
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2184-491: The only ones used, meaning that there has been little use for the second channel. Early Spanish SAP captioned broadcasts first used the second channel CC2 because the original caption decoders only read the first odd field, but later switched to using CC3 for bandwidth reasons. Due to the same bandwidth reasons XDS was never used by Spanish-speaking stations. Within each channel, there are two streams of information which might be considered sub-channels: one carries "captions" and
2236-820: The option of searching by genre, as well as immediate one-touch access to, or recording of, a selected program. Reminders and parental control functions are also often included. The IPGs within some DirecTV IRDs can control a VCR using an attached infrared emitter that emulates its remote control. The latest development in IPGs is personalization through a recommendation engine or semantics . Semantics are used to permit interest-based suggestions to one or several viewers on what to watch or record based on past patterns. One such IPG, iFanzy , allows users to customize its appearance. Standards for delivery of scheduling information to television-based IPGs vary from application to application, and by country. Older television IPGs like Guide Plus + relied on analog technology (such as
2288-521: The other "text". The latter is not in common use due to the lack of hardware support and bandwidth available. Text is signaled by the use of text commands and can be used for a formatted URL string with a 16-bit checksum that designates a web site that the captions relate to or a local station communication channel. This layering is based on the OSI Protocol Reference Model : SDI or DVD The user data structure that follows
2340-730: The other hand, customarily rely upon third-party listings metadata aggregators to provide them with their on-screen listings data. Such companies include Tribune TV Data (now Gracenote , part of Nielsen Holdings ), Gemstar-TV Guide (now TiVo Corporation ), FYI Television, Inc. in the United States and Europe; TV Media in the United States and Canada; Broadcasting Dataservices in Europe and Dayscript in Latin America ; and What's On India Media Pvt. Ltd in India , Sri Lanka , Indonesia ,
2392-551: The particular action. The command bits allow 16 possibilities, which are: resume caption loading (0000), backspace (0001), delete to end of row (0100), roll-up captions 2-rows, roll-up captions 3 rows, roll-up captions 4-rows, flash on (0.25 seconds once per second), resume direct captioning, text restart, resume text display, erase displayed memory, carriage return, erase nondisplayed memory, end of caption (1111). For tabs these are as follows: Bits 14, 13, 6, 4, 3, 2 are always 0, bits 12, 10, 9, 8, 5 are always 1. Bits 1 and 0 determine
2444-435: The plain single quote from the extended character set should be used. The only typical use in North America of this set is the use of the eighth note character to denote changes from spoken dialogue to singing or musical only scenes. It is an acceptable broadcast engineering practice when translating EIA-608 to Teletext for PAL compatible countries to substitute this character for a number sign because of its similarity to
2496-574: The present day is typically sent within each station's MPEG transport stream , or alongside it in a special data stream. The ATSC standard for digital terrestrial television, for instance, uses tables sent in each station's PSIP . These tables are meant to contain program start times and titles along with additional program descriptive metadata. Current time signals are also included for on-screen display purposes, and they are also used to set timers on recording devices. Devices embedded within modern digital cable and satellite television receivers, on
2548-546: The representation of the Spanish, French, German languages, and cross section of other Western European languages. EIA-608 was also extended to support two byte characters for the Korean and Japanese markets. The full version of EIA-708 has support for more character sets and better caption positioning options; however, because of existing EIA-608 hardware and revisions to the format, there has been little or no real world use of
2600-472: The user could use the guide without having to be on a particular satellite or service. In March 1990, a second generation SuperGuide system was introduced that was integrated into the Uniden 4800 receiver. This version had a color display and the hardware was based on a custom chip; it was also able to disseminate up to two weeks of programming information. When the user found the show of interest, they pressed
2652-598: The widespread availability of interactive program guides for television; TV Guide Network, the largest of these services, eventually abandoned its original purpose as a non-interactive EPG service and became a traditional general entertainment cable channel, eventually rebranding as Pop in January 2015. Television-based IPGs provide the same information as EPGs, but faster and often in much more detail. When television IPGs are supported by PVRs , they enable viewers to plan viewing and recording by selecting broadcasts directly from
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#17327987126962704-412: Was used to interact with the unit. When the user found a show they wanted to watch, they would have to turn off the guide and then tune the satellite receiver to the correct service. The system was developed by Chris Schultheiss of STV/OnSat and engineer Peter Hallenbeck. The guide information was distributed by satellite using the home owner's dish as the receiver. The information was stored locally so that
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