Issues with Quality of Closed Captioning!!

Hi, I like to have the captioning on also. I was watching Beowulf yesterday on Sho time. Lots of the captioning was garbled for some reason. I get HD from Comcast via a HD Tivo. I have tried various schemes with the Tivo to clean up the captioning but if it's messed up nothing seems to help. Except over the air stuff improves if I turn off the digital captioning option.

Anyway thanks for the post

john

Straight to the lawsuits. What a country.

In a manner of speaking, Ink Noise has got a point: The first step is putting in place laws and/or regulations that specify quality standards for captions and for caption delivery reliability. There are no such rules on the books. It is unreasonable to expect to be able to sanction providers for failing to comply with standards that simply don't exist yet. So we need to get legislators and regulators to care more about our needs, then we can hope for some relief.

Full Disclosure: I live in a closed caption-dependent household; my wife is hearing impaired.

Moved to HDTV Technical.

There is an existing topic on this subject, I'll look for it later and see if merge is necessary.

Do you know if it was in Technical?

In many cases, the problems you're seeing with the captions may be caused by technical problems at the station end or your pay TV service. I'm not seeing problems with the "FlashForward" or "V" captions in the SF Bay Area, so that tells me that your local ABC station probably has a problem with the way that captions are coming through that station's equipment. (Another possibility is the satellite, depending on what part of the country you're in.)

I know of many, many stations and pay TV service providers that have had glitches with their transmission of caption data, but they need to be told about these problems. Many stations don't seem to be monitoring the advanced digital captions; they're only monitoring the basic, CC1 captions, and they may be unaware of the problem with the advanced ones. The pay TV service provider can also be the source of the technical transmission problem. Please contact your pay TV service (if that's what you're using) or your local ABC station and provide as much detail as you can about the kinds of problems you're seeing on the ABC channel. Be sure to specific whether the problem is with the advanced captions---many people are clueless that they even exist.

There *is* an FCC complaint process about caption problems, but it currently requires contacting the pay TV service provider first, if you have one, or contacting the TV station if you use over-the-air transmissions. To lay the groundwork for filing a formal complaint, you need to allege a violation in the contact with the station. If they don't resolve the problem with 45 days, then you can send the complaint to the FCC.

Many TV station engineers will try to fix caption problems as soon as possible, while other TV station engineers have not. I have started with a more casual approach first, but if the response is cavalier, then I'll follow up with a statement alleging violation of the FCC statute. DirecTV, for example, isn't providing any captions at all for many programs on the 101 Network, despite my complaint about this problem, and I believe that's a violation of FCC captioning requirements. I expect to file a formal complaint soon since the 45 day time limit is coming up soon with no resolution of the problem.

We've also been discussing, in another forum, a situation with certain DTAs (Pace and Thompson -- but I'm seeing the same problem with my kitchen television's built-in decoder) where captions are being presented like this, for some shows:

CCCAAAAPPTTTIIIOOONNN

We know that this is equipment related because the same program recorded from the same service provider in the same home doesn't manifest the problem using a different decoder.

Stuff like that really makes it hard to pin down problems (unless, like me, you've got a lot of equipment around and the bandwidth to try something several ways to get a like-to-like comparison).

What about this one?

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1036172

There is a 3 year waiver of captioning for a new network. Is 101 new?

Even then, DirecTV isn't new, so I don't know if they qualify for the three year waiver.

I experienced different captioning results with one station, too, and learned that other people in the area with certain kinds of TVs had problems, too. The TVs that had problems decoding captions from one station were Samsung, Sharp and Sony HDTVs, whereas my LG converter box and Panasonic DVD recorder and someone's Magnavox TV didn't have a problem. Eventually the problem got fixed at the station level, though I don't know what they did.

One knowledgeable person suggested that possibly the errant station is not broadcasting the PSIP information properly, which may affect some decoding chips more than others (I don't know why). See the following topic about how some stations still have trouble broadcasting the PSIP correctly:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1183665

The station needs to make sure they have done a firmware update on their equipment (including the MPEG encoder) and to doublecheck they're broadcasting all PSIP information properly.

I know of one station that took more than seven months to fix their captioning problems; if they had simply done a firmware update on their MPEG encoder (not the caption encoder), they would have fixed the problem much, much earlier.

The automatic waiver is for 4 years.


They do. The waiver was applicable to UHD, even though they were owned by NBC Universal.

Not sure why you're using the name "UHD."

According to Wikipedia's entry for the 101 Network, it's been around in various permutations since 1999, and it also looks like it existed as the 101 Network in early 2005. At any rate, I never received a satisfactory response from them since my initial complaint September 29th, 2009, and the 45 day window is just about over.

The're also supposed to pass through captions for previously captioned programs, and they haven't been doing that for programs like "The Nine" or "Sleeper Cell," though they've been doing that for some programs like "Wonderland." When I'm paying for DirecTV service, it's quite objectionable not to have access to programs that were already captioned.

Sorry... when you post online a lot in television forums, you start abbreviating things you refer to a lot.

UHD = Universal HD

http://www.universalhd.com/

UHD was mentioned as an example of the automatic four year waiver -- I should have made that clearer.

Incidentally, within a month after the four years were up, just about everything on UHD was closed captioned.


As such, DirecTV 101 would not qualify for the automatic four year waiver.


I really don't like the way the law is worded. Read literally, if the network is eligible for the automatic waiver, then ever the response time limit rules don't apply to them.

You can tell that these rules were written by people who were considering accommodation for the hearing impaired to be no different than accommodating consumers in general, instead of accommodating a protected class as a matter of concern for the a public good.


While they should be providing closed captions, it is important to note that they are not rebroadcasting The Nine or Sleeper Cell. They are broadcasting it. That makes their obligation even more direct.