Closed-captioning on My Name is Earl

There wasn't any on last night's show and I needed it a few times to
make out what was being said. This is NBC in New York City.

How come?

EGTea...

The deaf people opted out. They said the captioning funds could be better
spent elsewhere, like Teletubbies.

EGK...

I need to use it all the time and it was working on the Syracuse NBC
affiliate. Your local station may not have turned it on. I've seen that
happen occasionally.

I also notice in the last few years stations have a tendency to run logos or
whatever across the bottom of the screens which blocks the captions.

Taylor...

Um... no. The (closed) captions should go over top of the logo or 1/3rds
(ads at the bottom of the screen).

~consul...

On some shows, the captions go near the heads of the folks who say them, or at
least on the screen sides of the speaker, with parenthesis for off screen
speakers. But this may be just on HD feeds.

Stan Brown...

On my set it's the other way 'round -- the captions block everything
else.

Are you _certain_ that it's different on your set? Given that the
decision to show captions or not is made by the TV set and not by the
station, I'm skeptical.

EGK...

"block" was the wrong word to use. Sometimes stations will put a logo or
something else on the screen that interferes with line 21 of the vertical
blanking interval. That's where the hidden captions are placed. When that
happens, no captions show at all. I see this sometimes when local stations
put a logo or a scrawling text or something similar on the screen. The
captions disappear until whatever is taking up line 21 is removed. If it
doesn't overlap line 21 then the captions still appear.

Stan Brown...

Thanks -- that explanation makes sense.

One thing I just learned recently was that DVD players also have to include
the chip to show the captions. I bought a combo vhs/dvd player and the dvd
side doesn't support CC. It shows dvd subtitles but not captions even
though the disks have them.

me...

ah, so that's why my old Orion one won't show them, but they show up on
my PC and another player. I figured it was the TV. I hadn't tried any other
combos of that player and different TV's.

Stan Brown...

Hmm ... another surprise. I guess I'm lucky, because I have a number
of DVDs with captions but no subtitles, and luckily I'm able to see
the captions when I make the appropriate setting on my TV. I had
always assumed the DVD player just passes on that part of the signal
under all circumstances, but I guess what you're saying is that some
DVD players do and some don't.

EGK...

It ticked me off a bit because I have some older disks that are closed
captioned but don't include subtitles. The VHS side of the Daewoo combo

Stan Brown...

Both /Yes Minister/ and /Yes Prime Minister/ have closed captions but
no subtitles, and they're not very old. I've found others too.

Annoying, isn't it? And one has to wonder how much money, if any, was
saved in the authoring process.

player works with CC. Just the DVD side doesn't. I emailed them and from
their response it was obvious the person who replied didn't know the
difference between cc and subtitles. Another Apex player plays them with no
problems but the closed caption option has to be turned on in the player's
menu. I had always assumed only the TV had to have the captioning chip
built in.

I'm no expert but I think this has to do with the digital files of DVD. On
VHS, the cc is copied right along with the video to the tape so playback
only requires a decoding chip in the TV. I think with dvd players it's

BTR1701...

You also run into problems with all these new "plasma TVs" and "LCD TVs"
which really aren't TVs at all. They're just huge computer monitors that
you hook your various components up to.

I remember finding out after I had my new gee-whiz home theater system
all hooked up that there's no way to put the captions on because there's
no actual TV there. It's just a monitor receiving input from the VCR,
the cable box or DVD player and if there's no way to turn on the
captions in the component itself, they can't be displayed.

EGK...

Geeze. So you'd basically need one of the old fashioned caption decoder
boxes if you don't have a tuner built in to the system. I had one of those
for years and it was bigger than modern VCR's. Even that probably
wouldn't work for you since I'm sure you use audio/Video cables with a setup
like that. Those old boxes only had co-ax connectors.

That's one drawback to advancing technology. No one bothers to make sure
the new technology can still do everything the old did.

~consul...

On my HDTV, which is a LCD TV that I also use as a computer monitor, it can play

BTR1701...

Yep. It's not that big a deal for me since I don't really need the
captions. I just like to have the ability to turn them on if a certain
bit of dialog in unintelligible for whatever reason.

I can still use the subtitle features on the DVDs. It's just the
broadcast TV and cable shows that I have to do without.

both.

And if I choose subtitles on the DVD menu, and CC on the TV, I've noticed that
they sometimes don't match. :)

When I hooked up my laptop to display on the new tv, for the life of me I
couldn't get what I thought was subtitles off the screen, when in fact it was
the CC setting for that input mode.

different. I had thought for a while about buying a TV card for my
computer in order to make my own DVD's but I found out while they will allow
viewing of the captions while the show is on, most of them are incapable of
playing them back with the captured video. The cc can only be captured to a
separate file.