0.1d (2026-08-27) — closed captions, D-Pad Seek, blocky-still fix
Everything merged since 0.1c: closed captions, a decoder fix for blocky menu stills, and D-Pad Seek.
Closed captions on line 21 (#12)
NTSC discs carry their captions inside the MPEG-2 video stream, not as subtitles. The core
now extracts them and re-inserts them on line 21 of the analog output, so your
television's own caption decoder renders them — the same way a real DVD player does.
Line-21 CC (debug page, default On). NTSC and analog output only — the waveform
lives in the blanking interval, invisible unless the TV decodes it, so leaving it on costs
nothing. Turn it Off only for capture devices or upscalers that display VBI lines.
Because a caption that does not appear gives you no way to tell "the TV is not decoding"
from "no data is reaching the output", there is also a CC Test Line diagnostic that
paints the same waveform on a visible line near the top of the picture — a band of dashes
that moves with the dialogue.
Of 34 discs surveyed, 6 carry live captions; none of the PAL discs do.
Blocky menu and game stills — fixed (#13)
A menu or game still could come up blocky, as though it had not finished loading. The
decoder was writing the new picture into the very frame slot the display was scanning out,
so you saw a half-decoded image. This was an upstream decoder bug, present since the
original import and untouched since.
Confirmed fixed on hardware — the artifacting on the Harry Potter interactive disc is
gone, with no regressions on other discs.
D-Pad Seek — jump by time (#15)
New D-Pad Seek setting (main OSD page, default Off). Turn it on and the D-pad
seeks while a title plays:
- Left / Right — back / forward 10 seconds
- Down / Up — back / forward 1 minute
Taps add up, and each one restarts a short window, so you can keep tapping to build a jump
of any length — tap Up twenty times for a 20-minute skip. The SEEK FWD 12:30 readout
shows the running total while you tap, and the jump happens once you stop.
On a DVD the targets come from the disc's own authored seek tables, so a jump lands on
a real frame rather than an estimated position. Raw VCD/SVCD images use the exact CD
geometry instead. Flat .mpg/.VOB files are not covered — use Fast Forward / Rewind
there, which is unchanged.
Why it is off by default: some interactive and game DVDs play seekable video while
expecting the D-pad as game input. Leaving it off keeps the D-pad purely navigational for
everyone who does not ask for this. When it is on, disc menus and the on-screen menus of
interactive DVDs still keep the D-pad — seeking is suppressed there.
Documentation (#14)
Corrected two wrong licensing statements, and retracted a clean-room claim about the AC-3
decoder — it derives from liba52, and the derivation is now stated in NOTICE.
Install
Copy DVD_v01d_20260827_0614.rbf to your SD card.
Full changelog: v0.1c-20260826...v0.1d-20260827