Re: PAL Closed-Captioning with Encore/DVD Studio Pro

Jessica,

Nothing, not DVDSP, not Scenarist nor anything else, supports closed captioning in PAL. For captioning to work in PAL, you need a way to encode the caption data into the first line of active video, which is line 25. No DVD encoder is set up to do this. Then there must be a way to decode the closed caption data from line 25. No PAL-only TV receiver or monitor has a caption decoder. The DVD player does not decode the captions; rather it passes the data along to the TV set. Software media players such as Quicktime player read captions from a metadata track.

I strongly urge you to forget about closed captions and go with DVD subtitles instead.

I've been working in a facility in New York for the past 16 years that does a heavy volume of work in PAL. If there was a way to do closed captions in PAL, we would have found it by now. There certainly have been enough requests over the years.

Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City