There is such a thing as too much captioning
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:
- When you call up either or both Info screens.
- When using the electronic program guide.
- 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.