HDMI Does Not Work for Captioning
Banjo's World has a captioned vlog about the problems with HDMI and captioning. Even though Banjo explains it in layman's terms, I don't fully understand it. However, the bottom line is clear - if you are deaf and buy a HDTV, the captions may not work! Of course this is not fair, and given that analog television is going away completely by February 2009, it is even more unfair! (I have yet to buy a HDTV myself. You better believe that if the captions don't work after I buy a HDTV, I'm going to give certain companies and federal agencies hell).
7 Comments:
Thanks for blogging on my vlog. :-)
Well, the problem with HDMI cable is that when the engineers designed it, they overlooked or ignored the importance of adding a channel for CC signal to go through.
HDMI carries video and audio. The video signal cannot carry the CC signal on HDMI, so a separate channel would be needed to carry it. It would require very, very tiny amount of data to go through. HDMI cables can carry quite a massive amount of data all at once. So why not a few bytes for the CC?
Hmm!
Again, thanks for blogging on this. I hope more people will!
Oddly, I just set up my nu LCD TV with HDMI cable from my Comcast cable box. Cable box captioning had been set to ON, and those captions come thru the HDMI just fine.
Q: BUT: I've lost the captions that comes on DVDs. Those captions had showed just fine when I'd connected my plain-old DVD player by composite cables to my old analog TV. The same DVD player is now connected to the LCD TV with composite cables. Could it be that composite cables don't carry captions? If so, would S-video cable be better for this important purpose ?
Oddly, I just set up my nu LCD TV with HDMI cable from my Comcast cable box. Cable box captioning had been set to ON, and those captions come thru the HDMI just fine.
Q: BUT: I've lost the captions that comes on DVDs. Those captions had showed just fine when I'd connected my plain-old DVD player by composite cables to my old analog TV. The same DVD player is now connected to the LCD TV with composite cables. Could it be that composite cables don't carry captions? If so, would S-video cable be better for this important purpose ?
Sorry. Dumb me.
To view subtitles, the DVD player had to be reset; it had been unplugged. It needs to be reset for every DVD.
alowin@earthlink.net said...
"Oddly, I just set up my nu LCD TV with HDMI cable from my Comcast cable box. Cable box captioning had been set to ON, and those captions come thru the HDMI just fine."
That's because your cable box is doing the rendering and overlaying it onto the video rather than sending the CC signal through the HDMI cable.
Hope this explains why you can see CC from your cable box.
Thank you for this blog...
I have seen many sites before and most of them do not look this good.
Regards,
SBL – Video audio tagging
Compostie and Compoment cables allows CC to pass through. NOT S-VIDEO... And now I'm appalled to find out that HDMI has the same problem. Grr...
There's info on this in WIKI on CC. Scroll down to DVD section and it briefly explains what Banjo explains...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_captioning
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