rcolbeck

February 01, 2010 at 7:57pm

I think Media Players are awesome. However few  supports what is a widely used but often ignored format - Closed Captioning! While often for the deaf and hearing imparied, it is also popular with ESL (english as Second Lanuage). It is invisible to regular users but when enabled on TV as "CC1" for English or CC2 for other languages if available then they will appear as white text inside black boxes and are highly flexible in their positions to reflect where/who the noise or voice is coming from. Often also contain background noise such as [knocking] or [sighs...],  [coughing], etc..

Unfortunately, HDMI does not carry CC stream to the TV so the CC doesnt work. Current Blu-Ray solutions is to use SDH (Subtitled for the Deaf and Heaing Imparied) however their positions are much limited and usually in the middle so we have no idea where the sound is coming from. STBs's solution is to recieve CC stream and overlay it as bitmap picture so it will be carried through HDMI with the video and audio.

Media Players being new to the field usually arent aware of these issues with CC. I am hoping that people will read this and be more aware and improve the products for accessibility and other purposes.

Please provide this feature and state such feature on the specs list. CC should be part of the support for SRT, SMI, and other subtitles formats (which is popular).

PS. for more information - CC is also known as Line 21 or VBI.

PSS. HDMI not carrying CC stream? It's a whole other long story - google it up. People is trying to get FCC inolved in this.