Convert SCC (two-byte hexadecimal words) to string

Question

Given the following string:

00:00:03:13 9420 9454 5bcb 45d9 c24f c152 c449 cec7 94f2 c1ce c420 434f cdd0 d554 4552 20ce 4f49 d345 d35d

How would I convert this to text?

Answer 1

pycaption is a library I found. pip install pycaption and try to parse your sample:

from pycaption import SCCReader
input = '00:00:03:13 9420 9454 5bcb 45d9 c24f c152 c449 cec7 94f2 c1ce c420 434f cdd0 d554 4552 20ce 4f49 d345 d35d'
contents = SCCReader().read(input.decode('utf-8'))
contents.get_captions('en-US')

You will get errors:

pycaption.exceptions.CaptionReadNoCaptions: CaptionReadNoCaptions((u'empty caption file',))

That's because SCC doesn't only contain encoded text, it also has commands inside. The first 2 bytes 9420 means "start pop-on caption". A tailing 942f (End Of Caption) is expected in order to show the text properly. But it's missing in your sample. I think it's in following parts that you didn't paste. Meanwhile, first line of SCC file should be version format. Let's add 2 lines into your sample:

input = '''Scenarist_SCC V1.0

00:00:03:13 9420 9454 5bcb 45d9 c24f c152 c449 cec7 94f2 c1ce c420 434f cdd0 d554 4552 20ce 4f49 d345 d35d

00:00:04:00 942f
'''

Then the output would be:

[u'00:00:04.037 --> 00:00:00.000\n[KEYBOARDING\nAND COMPUTER NOISES]']