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So I have three discs of each film from DTS’ forgotten accessibility system:
- Ratatouille (2007)
- WALL-E (2008)
and - Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008)
Though I was able to successfully preserve the audio description tracks thanks to Audacity, I unfortunately couldn’t find a way to decode the captions, since they’re specially made for the DTS-CSS software (https://www.datasatdigital.com/cinema-product-support-legacy/dts-css-system/). Though I was able to dig in to what the captions are like. To quote my archive:
“…the CSS captions are a series of bitmaps for closed captions that were compressed in a specially made “.SBT” file archive, meaning I can’t find a way to extract them, even though if you use a hex editor, you will be able to see the original names of the “.BMP” files of the captions. Also, if you were able to take a piece of the bitmap data, put it into a blank file with a hex editor, then use it on BerylRose’s BitPlot web app, you’ll be able to see what the bitmap file would’ve looked like. I attempted this with the captions for the Bill and Buzz test film included in the update file included on some discs, just to give you an idea on what they might look like, and I’ve included it in this archive for all of you to see. For the rear window captions, they were stored in a “.CAP” format where it manages to contain readable English text for the captions, albeit in backwards, and the time for those captions was just binary data, meaning it is impossible to determine the actual time when the captions were shown. Also, according to DTS themselves, many of them were also made to be compatible with the Rear Window Captioning System.”
So I just wanted to post this topic just for anyone who has a prior knowledge of how we can find a way to get the “.CAP” files to be compatible with the text-based subtitle files, and “.SBT” files to an image-based file, like VobSub or PGS.
Let me know if you found a way or actually got access to the DTS-CSS software.
The archive is here (https://archive.org/details/dtscssarchive)