Question Captioning (Line 21 analog) on dvd players with HDMI - not formatted

patrick57

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Hello!

The problem for many years with captioning and DVD players was that DVDs that used line 21 analog captions viewable through non-HDMI connections would have this type of captioning not pass through if HDMI was used to view the DVD. This style of caption is popularly seen as white text on black backgrounds. And TV set-top boxes have decoders so that HDMI connected televisions do not lose this captioning track.

Subtitles (SDH) have been used for years for DVDs as well as blu-rays, but manufacturers still used CC (analog, Line 21) captions on many DVDs and for a while, many DVD/Blu-Ray players had no solution aside from using composite cabling to allow this captioning through. You see, the HDMI cabling did not pass through this information (non-digital composite cables were required to allow the television's captioning decoder to decode the DVD's captions).

(If you want to read more, here's a thread: hdmi does not support closed caption?)


Now, since I believe 2008 or so, players have been required to have internal decoders for this type of captioning, so people no longer need to worry about it coming through on HDMI.

But, what I'm noticing is that the formatting of the captioning is not very good compared to when it's decoded by the TV (which is not possible when using HDMI). The captioning ends up to the left and not centered and seems to miss a letter or two now and then. It seems the decoder that the manufacturers are using are not very sophisticated, even for these simple captions.

Has anyone else noticed this happening? Have you tried different players with better decoding? I'm assuming the manufacturers followed the (thankful) mandate with minimal effort and just put a cheap decoder in the machine, unfortunately.

Again, this isn't referring to Subtitles in English or SDH (subtitled for the deaf or hard-of-hearing).

I hope I explained the situation clearly. It's a weird set up but thankfully there's been progress made!

Patrick
 

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