Axxlog

It wasn’t a sure thing that the Explorer 8000 PVR would record and play back captions with no trouble. ReplayTV muffs it, for example.

The problem, you see, is digitization. Not all lines of the TV picture are recorded. NTSC DVDs, for example, begin digitizing at Line 23 (Taylor, DVD Demystified, p. 292). But oopsy! captions reside on Line 21.

So for DVD, in broad terms the captioner has to provide a file in the vaunted .scc format, which DVD-authoring software can import and digitize in a special packet of the digital stream. Compliant DVD players – and not all of them are – then regenerate the caption data in Line 21 on playback. I don’t know how home DVD recorders work, actually, and I’ve checked for details. I don’t see how it could be anything but the same way, except in that case they’re capturing and reshaping actual Line 21 data.

Anyway, PVRs use the same MPEG encoding that DVDs do, so it was my fear that the box would be poorly engineered and wouldn’t capture the captions.

So far I have had not the slightest problem with conventional captions – that is, Line 21, field 1, channel 1 (“CC1”), where vastly in excess of 99% of all captions reside. Now, what about the rest of them?

CC2 (Line 21, field 1, channel 2)

Rarely used, mostly for easy-reader captions, though nobody is consistent about this. Arthur has regular captions on CC1 and easy-reader on CC2, while the Tonight Show has English on CC1 and Spanish (still in HIDEOUS ALL-CAPS) on CC2.

CC3 (Line 21, field 2, channel 1)

Also rarely used. Only known application is Spanish on some episodes of 60 Minutes and 60 Minutes II. Spanish tends to be available if and only if items on the show are frozen well enough in advance to caption them in English and translate. I haven’t seen Spanish captions in weeks.

I verified that CC2 captions work fine on the PVR. I can’t find an episode of either flavour of 60 Minutes with CC3 captions, and I might not have found one by the time I give the PVR back. Verified that captions on CC3 work fine on 60 Minutes II.

Too much muchness

A success story, then? Not quite.

Just like my previous digital box (this firmware is clearly common to the two models), the PVR always passes captions through, including these times:

1. When you call up either or both Info screens.
2. When using the electronic program guide.
3. When using any recording function whatsoever in which video with captions is shown as picture-in-picture, as in setting up a program recording.

That means captions cover up what you’re doing. And this isn’t a small thing: Most captions are on the bottom third of the screen, where, coincidentally, nearly all the menu screens you have to respond to are located. Captions cover up what you’re doing, I reiterate.

But is that all? Not hardly!

You can turn on the 8000’s diagnostic menus by holding down the button in the centre of the arrow keys on the face of the 8000 for five seconds. When the light starts blinking, press Info. You can then left- and right-arrow through what are reported to be 22 screens of diagnostic information. It’s fun to do – once.

And while you’re doing it, all the captions on the program you were watching come right through. I shit you not. The pattern seems to be that TV audio is never impaired even when picture is reduced or blocked; whenever there’s audio there are captions.

So what should it be doing?

Worse

Block captions when using picture-in-picture or when picture is absent but audio is present.

Better

Block captions from being transmitted to the television when using picture-in-picture. Decode them inside the 8000 and place them on the picture-in-picture. (This will also work for the dedicated picture-in-picture function: You can watch, listen to, and read captions only on the main picture; you can only watch the inset picture. This way you could at least read along.)

For the latter idea to work, the PVR would have to decode its own closed captions – trivial compared to what else it does, but they’re altogether likely to screw up the fonts. Other PVR-like devices do their own captioning, like virtually any computer running WinXP Media Center Edition.

Interestingly, my old digital box, a 3200, also transmits captions whenever a menu is onscreen. It too is doing something wrong. My question is: Was this a deliberate design feature (in which case it’s a bust) or is it a bug? Either way, it needs fixing.

I’m working on the big PVR captioning and audio-description postings here, and as of last night (note well: February 23) the box is going haywire. It crashed on recording a certain show. (An Evening with Kevin Smith, which I wanted to retain to use against the captioners later – were you unaware that I have boxes of tapes for that purpose?) Today it claims the only shows I ever want to record are The Eleventh Hour and Prisoners of Gravity. I think not.

Whatever might be the problem?

What might be the problem is that Scientific Atlanta couldn’t manage to make a PVR that doesn’t choke on a leap year. The program guide spooled out seven days past February 23 and… and… got February 29 instead. This does not compute. The ghost of Pierre Elliott Trudeau haunts us all. (Also the ghost of Svend Robinson, but he’s not dead yet!)

But hey, we made Slashdot. And PVRBlog.

And here I am expecting them to get this thing working for blind people.

David Pescovitz, “Wirelessly Enabling the Disabled”:

Currently, the best captioning technology offered by some movie theaters is Rear Window, a scrolling LED display

Nothing scrolls. It’s pop-on captions only.

mounted at the rear of the theater that displays mirror-images of the captions already embedded in Hollywood films.

They’re not “embedded,” and they’re certainly not embedded in all Hollywood films, as implied. Captions and descriptions reside on a separate CD-ROM that can be played by itself, or its contents can be copied to a hard drive. In either event, the player, reading timecodes that are embedded in Hollywood films (on the frame margins), and triggers caption display and description playback. There are no separate prints, and in fact you can use any print you want of a specific movie.

Hard-of-hearing audience members watch the film through transparent reflective panels mounted on the chairs.

They’re translucent. They could be transparent for reasons of optics, but they aren’t. They’re smoked plexiglas.

“It’s awkward,” Mitchell says. “Even if the text is provided on the screen itself (at the bottom), you have to constantly look at the words and you miss the picture.”

That’s disingenuous. Any offscreen captioning system would generate the same complaint, as would all captioning systems, period, if you think about it.

Anyway, since I’ve watched more movies with Rear Window captioning than anyone else, I can categorically deny that “[i]t’s awkward.” If you’re in a good seat near the display, and if the reflector is in good shape, and if the LED display hasn’t been beaten to shit, the system works extremely well. It’s not very good for neophytes, though, or anyone with presbyopia, since it becomes difficult to switch focus between the captions and the movie.

The Center’s solution is simple, yet effective. Captions already embedded in films are transmitted to a PDA,

They’re not embedded in the film.

either belonging to the patron or borrowed from the theater. A tiny monitor that clips on any pair of eyeglasses virtually suspends the caption in the wearer’s field-of-vision.

This is the same as the Virtual Vision approach that was tried and rejected. You know, two different Technology Review articles have run on this topic, one of them written by me. (The other one, which I have here in front of me, is “Wireless for the Disabled,” December 2003/January 2004 [abstract], with no byline.)

Of course, live settings require a typist to provide the captioning.

No, a stenotypist. A stenocaptioner. CART, if you want to be more precise.

As speech recognition software improves though, it’s easy to envision a PDA-based portable captioning system so hearing-impaired individuals can read their real-world conversations without breaking eye contact.

Two generations hence, possibly, yes.

In that case, though, how does the “hearing-impaired” person talk back? Isn’t this the converse of reading out phrases from a foreign-language phrasebookbook, but not understanding what the natives say to you?

By the way, until I try this system and know it works, I think the idea of staring down in your lap at a PalmPilot to read captions is a non-starter. How is this really better than Rear Window? It apparently is not. I’m sure our dear British friends will lap it up, though, as is their wont.

See also

• Wearable Captioning homepage
• CSUN presentation
• Behind the booth
• Test of Closed-Caption Systems at Langley Theater

I admit to having been somewhat asleep at the switch on this one, but now that it’s getting some attention, I can provide historical background. You realize this is the third time it’s come up, right? The ghost of Baywatch haunts us still, primarily by appearing on Jerry Springer to plug its tell-all memoir.

The U.S. Department of Education has apparently decided that certain programming will receive sponsorship for captioning and certain other programming will not. DoEd has funded captioning since at least the late 1970s – The Captioned ABC News, which I watched (now almost notoriously) in my pyjamas as a young fella, was partly funded by DoEd, for example.

Current online coverage:

• “Censor Scooby-Doo? Words fail” (mentioned here already)
• “Small decision illuminates big ones”: “Here’s an unpublished government decision made in concert with unnamed individuals and only made public through the efforts of a nonprofit advocacy group”
• Neil Gaiman (does he watch captioning?)
• National Association of the Deaf press releases and backgrounders (from way back in October 2003):
  • “Television Captioning Censorship Hurts Family Values” (very much an unfortunate choice of words)
  • “NAD Applauds NCD Opposition to Captioning Censorship”
    • Letter from NCD to DoEd chair
  • Lists of approved and rejected shows

This is a rehash of a couple of scares that began in 1996.

1. First people were upset that DoEd sponsored captioning of that masterpiece of “educational” television, Baywatch (1996).
2. Later, some were shocked and appalled that Jerry Springer’s captioning was sponsored and wanted that funding pulled (1998). The case was argued that – to use my own words – deaf people and captioning viewers have the right to watch the same trash as everybody else.
3. U.S legislation to take effect in 2001 (IDEA – PDF or text) would have solely restricted DoEd to funding the captioning of programming deemed “educational, news, and informational.” In 1999, DoEd canvassed for public opinion on the topic of “what the term ‘educational, news, and informational’ encompasses in reference to the description and captioning of television, videos, and materials.”

I can’t find any information about what happened between that point in 1999 and late 2003, when the now-notorious accepted and banned lists were put together.

A few issues people aren’t talking about

1. DoEd grants, if memory serves, pay for only half the cost. You’d think this would result in twice as much total captioning, but I see no evidence of that whatsoever. Supremely popular TV series (yes, including Baywatch and Jerry Springer) that earn tons of money for producers are overrepresented in the history of DoEd funding. I have no evidence at hand that producers double the number of series they caption with DoEd funding. Instead, it simply reduces their costs. (And for producers with a single show on the go at any given time – the norm for mom-’n’-pop producers – the money, if only in the form of cost deferment, is pure gravy.)
2. Moreover, DoEd funding represents a gravy train for captioning agencies.
   1. CaptionMax, Vitac, WGBH, Caption Colorado, and NCI list DoEd funding, for example, though funding may not be current.
   2. As the FCC delicately put it, “Historically, there appears to have been a heavy reliance on federal funding of closed captioning and video description, particularly through U.S. Department of Education grants.” It’s a teat they are reluctant to wean themselves from.
   3. Remember, not all the grant money goes toward actual captioning; there’s also “administration” involved.
   4. And no matter who pays for the captioning or in what ratio, these are businesses earning money off the service. Margins are reportely quite tight with some of the nonprofit captioners, but that is not necessarily the case with the for-profit shops.
3. In the current list of disapproved shows, I can spot only a couple whose producers might genuinely be too poor to pay for captioning, and the only one I think is really too poor for it is In the Life (captioned this year by WGBH, previously by NCI). Clouding this argument is the fact that the shows are so skimpily described that I have not heard of many of them, which is as you would expect, as these are grants dealing with future programming.
4. Furthermore, there is no requirement that highest-quality captioning be used. I have a vague memory, but cannot point to examples, of DoEd-funded reality-TV shows that should have been captioned via pop-on or at worst by live display that were done by real-time captioning instead. (The one I have in mind is Blind Date, but I’m gonna have to look that up.)
5. It is at best debatable that captioning needs to be supported by government grants, something I’ve been saying since 1996.
   1. Is captioning still merely an added feature, something we do if we feel like it or if somebody else is willing to pony up half the cost?
   2. Why are people still pretending that an inaccessible program is the true underlying form, while captioning and description are extraneous and discretionary supplementary features?
6. If hundreds of other shows are captioned without DoEd funding, how important is it anymore? We have nothing like it in Canada, for example, yet we have proportionately more captioning on Canadian programs than the U.S. does on its own.
7. TV is expensive; captioning has been around for 30 years (closed captioning for 25); it’s possible find adequate captioning at reasonable rates, shitty captioning at fantastic rates, and very good captioning at high rates.
8. Nobody seems to be asking if similar lists have been compiled for audio-described programming. Described TV is still in its infancy a mere 15 years after it began, and it’s much more expensive than captioning. I can see a weak argument for government funding of description. In fact, I would not severely object if only description were funded.
9. Likewise, a separate program to caption (often open-caption) educational videos that are unlikely ever to be broadcast makes sense to me, as long as those or similar videos are also described. The Captioned Media Program is administered by NAD and funded by the Department of Education ($17.25 million from 2001–2006), a conflict of interest its Web pages on the current contretemps do not bother to mention.
10. A denial of sponsorship for captioning is not “censorship,” as the NAD hysterically claims, and for the love of God, it has nothing to do with “family values.” Reduced funding may contribute to a denial of accessibility, but it does not prevent the show producers from expressing themselves.

More news as it develops. But in the meantime, if you are a resident of the United States, ask yourself this: Do you want the government of the day approving and rejecting television programming in the first place?

This PVR is constantly warning you of something it’s gonna do that you might or might not give a shit about. And I just missed the absolute perfect beauty shot!

The machine gave me a football-style two-minute warning that it was about to record not one but two programs. (I’ll alert the media.) It did so as I was attempting to watch the bravura opening scenes of the Luhrmannist Romeo + Juliet.

And I didn’t get a photo of it! What is my problem?