libcaption

libcaption is a library written in C to aid in the creating and parsing of closed caption data, open sourced under the MIT license to use within community developed broadcast tools. To maintain consistency across platforms libcaption aims to implement a subset of EIA608, CEA708 as supported by the Apple iOS platform.

608 support is currently limited to encoding and decoding the necessary control and preamble codes as well as support for the Basic North American, Special North American and Extended Western European character sets.

708 support is limited to encoding the 608 data in NTSC field 1 user data type structure.

In addition, utility functions to create h.264 SEI (Supplementary enhancement information) NALUs (Network Abstraction Layer Unit) for inclusion into an h.264 elementary stream are provided.

H.264 utility functions are limited to wrapping the 708 payload into a SEI NALU. This is accomplished by prepending the 708 payload with 3 bytes (nal_unit_type = 6, payloadType = 4, and PayloadSize = variable), and appending a stop bit encoded into a full byte (with a value of 127). In addition if the 708 payload contains an emulated start code, a three byte sequence equaling 0,0,1 an emulation prevention byte (3) is inserted. Functions to reverse this operation are also provided.

versions

xumo-0.10.1

• Fixed bugs in UTF-8 parsing that caused captions to stop after UTF-8 characters. xumo-0.10.0

• Fixed issues with stdout output of flv There were debug statements printing to stdout. Fixed them to print to stderr.

• Changing the order of 608 clear captions to spec previously it was sending an {EOC} - end of caption, then sending {EDM} erase-display-memory, and {ENM} erase-non-display-memory, after. Changes it to {EDM} {ENM} {EOC} credit Chris Gordon

Joey Ekstrom jekstrom@xumo.com

xumo-0.9.0

• Changed 608 captions to always anchor to the bottom. Because 608 has a 4 row maximum, we drop any caption rows that are past 4. Should revisit this when processing SRT.

• Fix function utf8_line_length Fixed an issue where the character being checked should be the next one, but instead was checking next + len, which made the last caption dissapear.

Joey Ekstrom jekstrom@xumo.com

0.8.0 Matthew Szatmary m3u8@twitch.tv / matt@szatmary.org

Characters

BNA		!	"	#	$	%	&	’	(	)	á	+	,	-	.	/
BNA	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	:	;	<	=	>	?
BNA	@	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H	I	J	K	L	M	N	O
BNA	P	Q	R	S	T	U	V	W	X	Y	Z	[	é	]	í	ó
BNA	ú	a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h	i	j	k	l	m	n	o
BNA	p	q	r	s	t	u	v	w	x	y	z	ç	÷	Ñ	ñ	█
SNA	®	°	½	¿	™	¢	£	♪	à		è	â	ê	î	ô	û
WES	Á	É	Ó	Ú	Ü	ü	‘	¡	*	'	—	©	℠	•	“	”
WEF	À	Â	Ç	È	Ê	Ë	ë	Î	Ï	ï	Ô	Ù	ù	Û	«	»
WEP	Ã	ã	Í	Ì	ì	Ò	ò	Õ	õ	{	}	\	^	_	|	~
WEG	Ä	ä	Ö	ö	ß	¥	¤	¦	Å	å	Ø	ø	┌	┐	└	┘

• BNA = Basic North American character set
• SNA = Special North American character set
• WES = Extended Western European character set : Extended Spanish/Miscellaneous
• WEF = Extended Western European character set : Extended French
• WEP = Extended Western European character set : Portuguese
• WEG = Extended Western European character set : German/Danish

Limitations

Current B-frame support for caption creation is minimal. libcaption ensures no re-ordering of captions is required on playback.

Build Directions

Mac Os/Linux

Install build dependencies (git, cmake, a compiler such as xcode, gcc or clang and optionally re2c and ffmpeg)

• run cmake . && make
• or to compile without re2c cmake -DENABLE_RE2C=OFF . && make
• finally sudo make install to install

Windows

I have never tested libcaption in windows. It is written in pure C with no dependencies, so there is no reason it would not work.