sweetstarz

For the last year or so, I have not had access to cable TV, and so have relied on the use of an antenna to receive my signal. I have noticed that it ALWAYS seems that when the reception is even the SLIGHTEST bit off, the captions get so messed up that they're unintelligible. Who else has this problem? Am I justified in my anger, or should I just get cable (which would be a hardship) and shut up about it?

Deafness

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Bottesini

If you are interested in tv, get cable. Otherwise just watch dvd or take up reading.

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peternagy

An amplifier might help.

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Peter

CCfan

What about you won't be watching TV for your favorite shows that would be not released on DVD or anything would be not captioned on DVD?

Otherwise, what about millions of deaf and hard-of-hearing could leave the TV by February 2009 so what
they do? TV ratings would lose an audience, and advertisers would be losing millions of bucks due to captioning messy. Good bye to TV commercials with captions or not. Kiss my butt to TV commercials
without captions, by 2009 it will be no longer to be boring with TV!
Then, I would buy DVD player or Blu-ray player with better captions; playing video games, go outside more than now, and
socializing with my friends. Yeah!

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I am closed captioning fan.

meyag2

no comment

Etoile

Don't feel alone, this happens to everyone who uses an antenna for reception. The reason is that captions are basically hidden in the picture. Imagine that it's like the Magic Eye pictures, where you have to look at it funny or cross your eyes to see the actual picture inside the pattern. It's the same way for captions...turning on the decoder makes it possible for you to "see the hidden picture" without crossing your eyes.

For this reason, if the picture is not perfect, you will get mistakes in the captions. The decoder is trying to give you the proper information, but it is getting junk from the picture, so it doesn't know what to tell you. It can see part of the picture, so you will see some correct captions, but the rest is fuzzy so it prints garbage.

Of course, lots of things cause fuzzy reception on an antenna...clouds, weather, lightning, etc. Cable is mostly safe from this because it is run underground through protected wires, so you get a perfect picture almost all the time with cable. That doesn't mean the captions don't get messed up, but it's a LOT less common than with an antenna.

There's not really anything you can do about it unless you are willing to change your equipment. If you get cable, DTV, or other modern technologies, these are all pretty safe from problems with captions. I hope this helps!

Bottesini

So basically it would be better for your health. I pay for cable and I will have captions after Feb. 2009. It is a matter of priorities. Cut something else out to make money available for cable and have closed captioning,.

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martyns

Let me tell you about a slight (ahem!) mistake made in the closed captions once here in Britain... the British Prime Minister was visiting a place called Helensburgh in Scotland, and the news anchor said, "And now over to our reporter with the Prime Minister in Helensburgh". Alas, the closed caption said, "And now over to our reporter in Helen's bra"!!!!!

sweetstarz

AHA! Now I get it. Thanks, that really made a lot of sense.

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etalton

Here is another option. Many of today's tv shows are available to download off the internet. There are also sites that have subtitle files that you can download for those tv shows. If you put the sub file in the same folder as the tv show, you can play them back on most computer video players and watch your show with subtitles. They, like the ones on tv, are not perfect, but it is an option. Also, if you are in the US, NBC.com has a CC feature for it's shows that you can watch streaming vid of. It takes a bit to get used to as the CC is to the right of the video, but it does work. Hope that helps..

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sweetstarz

Haha, yeah that's funny. That kind of thing happens ALL THE TIME here, too. Sometimes the results can be shocking.

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VamPyroX

Soon... you won't be able to use your antenna.

You might as well get cable or don't watch television at all.

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jejones3141

Captioning for analog TV (NTSC) has almost no error detection, and no error correction. Each character of the text is sent as an eight-bit byte with what's called "odd parity", i.e. the sender turns one of the bits (the most significant one, I believe) on or off so each byte has an odd number of 1-bits.

So... any problem with reception of those bits that makes the result have an even number of 1-bits can be noticed--but there's nothing that can be done about it save to throw out the group of two bytes (analog captions are sent two bytes at a time). Other errors aren't noticed, and result in the display of incorrect characters. If reception is poor, those problems will happen a lot, with the results that you see.

Cable TV, as other people have already said, will (ideally!) give you a better signal, so those problems will happen less often.

Digital TV (ATSC) devotes more bits to error detection and correction, so that some errors can be not only noticed, but fixed, so it's less subject to these problems. Basically, either you get a digital TV signal or you don't. You won't see a fuzzy picture; if it's so wrong that it can't be corrected, the TV won't display it. So, since over-the-air NTSC TV is going away soon (in about seven months) anyway, you could switch to digital.

BradB08

Most of what folks said here is true. Unless you have a TV that is digital ready, you won't be able to get any signals at all. You would have to buy a decoder box for digital signals. The government had a program for this where you'd get a debit card for $40 off a decoder box but there was a deadline.

I will just buy a digital-ready TV and get digital cable. I only get very basic cable right now because of the cost.