Back on September 13 I blogged about the at-times almost unintelligible subtitling on The Cell DVD I had picked up.
Yesterday a couple friends and I made one of our runs up to Princeton Record Exchange. I found a newer copy of The Cell for only two bucks, so for the sake of curiosity I picked it up because the different package design specifically states "English Subtitles And Closed Captions." I wanted to see if the subtitling was fixed and if the CC would work for me.
Well, the subtitles are fixed, but I still can't get the CCs to display. Maybe there's something odd about how I have the DVD/VCR combo unit connected to my TV (using the standard three component cables—Y, Pb, Pr), but I don't know how else I could do it.
The CCing works fine when playing back recorded tapes. The VCR feeds to the video 1 input of the TV and the DVD feeds to the video 3. I can view DVDs by tuning the TV to either video 1 or video 3, but can only view tapes on video 1. So I tried looking for DVD CCs on video 1, but still found none. It's a mystery.
Oh well, as long as the subtitling is fixed I don't need the CC feature, but it would be nice—if only to satisfy my curiosity—to figure out how to get CCs to work when playing DVDs. I'm assuming the packaging isn't just wrong when it says closed captions are available.
2 days ago
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2 comments:
Quite possibly your DVD player is not passing on the decrypted Line 21 data. Some don’t.
Thanks, Joe! I must admit that I've never heard the phrase "decrypted line 21 data," so I have no idea what it means except to gather that it obviously is essential for CCs. It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that line 21 swing. I could Google it, I'm sure, but at this point I've pretty much just come to the conclusion that I can't get CCs from the unit.
I did look at the manual and even though I don't like the way it's organized one bit, I couldn't find any mention of CCs, whether it's capable or not. Of course, I guess if it's not, well, they aren't gonna actually say that, are they? They just won't mention it at all.
As long as subtitles work—and are a reasonable facsimile of what the characters on screen are actually saying—I'm OK with that. If it hadn't been for the wacky subtitling on the first DVD of The Cell, I'd have never even thought to bother checking for CC functionality as an alternative.
Hmmm, changed my mind that quick and I actually did just go Google "decrypted line 21 data." I got a list of items which look far too technobabbly for my brain to handle, so yeah, I'll just take your word for it—well, along with the evidence of my own efforts—that my DVD player simply doesn't do CCs.
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