Abstract

1
DVD GENESIS
Hardware
Abstract
In the late 1990s, movie theatres came under
severe criticism for their unwillingness and
inability to make movies accessible to the
hearing-impaired. Following an ethical firestorm
and several lawsuits, movie theatres finally
showed a greater desire to implement a technology
that would provide subtitles for the
hearing-impaired, while maintaining the viewing
experience for the general audience. Several
technologies, including the Rear Window
Captioning System co-developed by the Media
Access Group and Rufus Seder, have been tested
since then, but none fit the preferred cost and
efficiency requirements put forth by the movie
theatres. DVD Genesis addresses these
requirements by extracting subtitles from a PCs
DVD player. The subtitles are then sent to an
external display that can be mounted inside a
seats cup-holder or on its armrest. The
displays arm can then be adjusted to position
the display in the users line of sight and at
the bottom of the movie screen, giving the
appearance of superimposed subtitles. Research
shows that by 2010 most movie theatres will have
transitioned to digital media (MPEG-2), making
DVD Genesis an extremely powerful solution for
this environment. Additionally, DVD Genesis
unique, low-cost design and user-friendly
interface also make it suitable for other
environments.
Methods
Serial RS232/TTL Matrix Orbital LCD LK404-25
Bluetooth Virtual COM Ports - AIRcable Serial3
Parsing the .SRT File
Start Time
End Time
Subtitle number
Synchronization of Subtitles with Video

• In order to synchronize the subtitles with the
  video, VLC Media Players source code is modified
  to output the movies running time to a text
  file.
• This time is then read by the DVD Genesis
  software, which integrates it with the
  information from the parsed .SRT file to handle
  the display and clearing of the subtitles from
  the screen.

Timestamps
Subtitle

• In order to transmit subtitles to an external
  display, DVD Genesis first converts the subtitles
  (stored as graphical bitmaps on DVDs) to a text
  format (.SRT) using SubRip (an Optical Character
  Recognition software).
• It then stores a pointer to the subtitle in an
  array according to its subtitle number and
  timestamp.
• Each pointer then links to elements in two
  separate arrays that hold the milliseconds of the
  timestamp and the duration (End Time Start
  Time) of the subtitle.

Group 10 Authors Arjun Batra EE 09 Raman Brar
EE 08 Kris Eng EE 08 Advisor Siddharth M.
Deliwala Demo Times Thursday, April 19,
2008 1030-1200PM, 130-230PM University of
Pennsylvania Dept. of Electrical and Systems
Engineering
System Diagram
Within 1 second
PC