Closed Captioning

We are a state government agency and are going to use our newly purchased Pearl 2 to stream live Board meetings. We need to comply with accessibility requirements and provide live captioning of the meeting.

We currently have live captioners, but are unable to input the captions into our video, in a closed captioned setting.

Trying to find out what solutions we might be able to find with the Pearl 2.

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You would either need to have the captions hard coded as part of the video signal being captured by the Pearl 2. Or alternatively use an online captioning service that could ingest the stream of the Pearl then add captioning either in an outgoing stream or separately to be added to a web page. Unfortunately we haven’t tested any of these services ourselves, but a quick google search brought up https://streamtext.net/ as a potential option

Asking a follow up… IF I were to purchase an EEG device to inject captions into HDSDI, would the Pearl then simply pass the captions through to the stream? Is this a possibility?

This depends on if the captioning data is hard coded as part of the video image, or if it is metadata. This would only work if this is hard coded onto the video itself. The Pearl does not capture any of the metadata that might be in the SDI signal.

Ugh… that’s not good. Is it possible to address this in a future update? That is a major showstopper for us, and we have like 8 Pearls in our inventory. Can you please advise?

Both support for forms of closed captioning and capturing of metadata are in the list of possible future features that the development and marketing team are considering. Unfortunately I cannot make any promises if they decide to implement these.

This would be excellent. I have to currently use a teradek cube, wirecast or vMix to achieve this. It would be most excellent to have the ability to accept CEA-608 from a hardware closed captioning encoder into the Pearl.

Hi - has there been any progress in adding 608/708 metadata through the encoder. Live Captioning is so important, especially now so with the focus on DE&I and would be a amazing feature to have!

An official feature request does exist for 608/708 metadata capture for our Pearl family and Livescrypt devices for consideration, however the feature request is still being explored at this time, and will not be coming in the shortterm in the next few firmware updates.
I will happily add your comment/note to the existing request for further consideration!

This definitely needs to happen as we spent ~$500k on another device for all our locations because the pearl cannot pass EEG captions from an HD492. There is an option for any of the RTMP feeds to go through the EEG Cloud encoding service called Falcon to have captions injected. That is our alternative when we don’t have a hardware encoder avail.