White Lines on Top of Digital Video

[solidgoldmini]

This may be a pretty simple question, but I've been searching here and Googling and I can't seem to find an answer, maybe because I'm not exactly sure what to call it. I have an EyeTV (200) which I use to record shows so I can watch them on my schedule. My coworkers and I like Desperate Housewives, and our office has a digital projector set up with a Mac Mini, so we occasionally have after work screenings of the week's episode. I sometimes use the EyeTV to convert the show into an MPEG-4 format, but this time I was pressed for time so I decided to just grab the raw MPEG-2 file that the EyeTV creates in it's Archive folder, and I figured I would just use VLC Player to play it at work. Now, the question. When I play it in VLC, it works fine, except I see a line of white-ish dancing...well, lines across the top of the screen, that are not visible when watching the show through the EyeTV or on the TV screen. I saw one place that it's the closed captioning information, someone else told me it could be the signature of the video recorder. I'm not sure what to look for because I don't know exactly what to call it. Googling 'white lines on video' doesn't turn up much. Thank you, digital video geniuses in advance for sharing your vast knowledge.

 

[#Johnny5]

Closed cap info

Yes, as far as I know, that is the way closed-captioning information is encoeded into analog broadcasts. You don't see it on your TV, because it's so small and close to the edge that it's covered by your TV's edges. And maybe EyeTV makes a habit of not showing it as well. I've noticed this quite a lot when I take analog TV and play it in a window on a computer, because there's nothing to hide it then.