TV tuner cards

with teletext capabilities and recording/playback of teletext captions.

This page shows test reports of video cards and software
for displaying and recording captions on computers.

German page | English page

Barrier Free Media:

Test Reports:

Barrier Free Media
- List of Requirements -
Date: Juny 26, 2003

If you cannot hear, you must see! In this case, auditory signals must be supplemented by visual information in the form of subtitles/captions and/or sign language. Videos whose auditory narrations are captioned or interpreted into sign language are considered "barrier free" for deaf and hard-of-hearing consumers. Their purchasing decisions depend greatly on how accessible a given medium is to them.

The German-Austrian consortium "Barrier Free Media" has compiled a list of what constitutes barriers for deaf consumers and proposed solutions.

Video cards
are only 'barrier free' if they are capable of displaying and recording captions within the viewer's window on the screen. "Deaf-friendly" Video cards are required to be able to...

  • decode caption data carried by Vertical Blanking Interval and display captions within the video window as an 'Overlay' on top of the movie (instead of displaying in a separate window).
  • display captions at single and double text height on call for visually impaired users.
  • correctly select a teletext page that carries captions, since different broadcasters transmit their caption codes on different pages, especially if they provide them in more than one language. [1]
  • record captions either
    1. directly onto the movie images, or
    2. into a separate subtitle file, using time codes that link the captions to specific movie-frames in an established data format. [2]

For ease of use, it should be possible to...

  • create a table of broadcasters with teletext page numbers that carry subtitle codes.
  • copy not only movie-frames but also the associated subtitles into the clipboard using screen capture software.

On Linux the video viewing software "Zapping/Zapzilla" supports the display of captions, where the text is normally displayed within the movie window. On Windows, on the other hand, captions are displayed only in a separate window of their own. See the test report: http://www.deaftv.de/tvtuner.htm


Summary of Test Reports
Date: Juny 26, 2003

Video card Win-TV Primio FM,
Win-TV Theater,
PCTV		 Win-TV Primio FM Win-TV Primio FM PCTV
Manufacturer Hauppauge, Pinnacle Sys. Hauppauge Hauppauge Pinnacle Systems
Operating system Linux Mandrake 9.1 Microsoft Windows 2000 Microsoft Windows XP Microsoft Windows XP
Software for video card Zapping/Zapzilla 0.6.7, bttv driver 0.7.100 and greater WinTV 2000/VTPlus WinTV 2000/VTPlus PCTV Vision, PCTV WebText
Testing hardware MSI KT4V-L (MS-6172-020), AMD Athlon XP 2400+, 512 MB (DDR-RAM), ATI Radeon 9500 DVI-TV 8x 128D MSI KT4V-L (MS-6172-020), AMD Athlon XP 2400+, 512 MB (DDR-RAM), ATI Radeon 9500 DVI-TV 8x 128D MSI, Pentium 4 1.7 GHz, 256 MB (SDRAM), Geforce2 64 MB SDRAM MSI, AMD Athlon XP 2400+, 384 MB (DDR-RAM), ATI 128 Rage 32 MB
Test report number 1 2 - 3
Display of captions
Overlay mode yes no no no
Caption broadcaster table no no no no
Snapshot yes (KSnapshot) no no no
Automatic refresh yes yes but tortuous yes but tortuous yes but no synchronisation
Recording of captions
Captions overlaid on top of the images no no no no
Captions in file of their own no no no no
Overall rating adequate poor poor very poor

Source List:

[1] International Captioning/Subtitling List:

  • PDF PDF-Dokument (Date: Juny 17, 2003 - Source: Steven Zahner)
    Note: The teletext captioning page numbers were tested by the author in Switzerland, but under certain circumstances, it is also possible to receive them in other countries.

[2] Multimedia standard formats:


Members of the consortium "Barrier Free Media":

- Lukas Huber
- Friedrich W. Mainzer
- Nikolaus Riemer
- Markus Maurer
- Bernd Schneider
- Bernd Rehling

Contact e-mail address: tvkarten@deaftv.de

Last Update: November 27, 2003