Closed Caption support on HD100

[dhbier]

I was pleasantly surprised to see that Closed Captions worked nativly on the HD100 once I upgraded to the new 6.6 version. I know it's a minor item, but it scored big points with my wife.

[reboot_this]

I second this... Me and my wife have so many times wanted to utilize cc when we cannot understand what the heck is being said on tv shows (either the words are garbled or inaudible)... works like a charm for us!

I do however notice that when, for instance, the weatherman is talking (fast) the cc can't keep up most times. Kinda funny.

I do wish that there was a "sagetv command" that was just for turning cc on/off or even to cycle it through cc1, cc2, off, etc. There is one for DVD subtitles, so maybe they'll add one for recordings too.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by reboot_this

I do however notice that when, for instance, the weatherman is talking (fast) the cc can't keep up most times. Kinda funny

Not really funny. How do you think the closed captions get there to begin with? There are armies of people whose sole job is to translate what people are saying into the text used on closed captions. If you can't keep up with what the weatherman is saying how do you think the person doing the captions in real-time feels?

[172pilot]

Just as a bit of information / trivia...

Those captions are typically entered by a "court reporter" using a stenography machine - That's the only way they can keep up, Rarely can a regular typist keep up with spoken word.

Because the stenography machines use phonetics or syllables to input, the systems have to buffer enough keystrokes to be able to match the longest word they'll ever translate. That's why there's a delay on "real time" (scrolling, rather than pop-up) captions..

For example, if the word "Catastrophic" is spoken, the stenographer has to enter 3 or 4 strokes .. "Cat", "a" "stra" "fic" basically (I'm not a stenographer, so I dont know exactly what each stroke would contain), but anyway.. If there's ANY mistake in any of the four strokes, the word wont match, and it'll assume the longest correct matches, which will likely be to output the words "cat a " then either just the raw steno strokes, or a word that may match the other two strokes.. perhaps something as different as "Strawberry" or something, depending on the steno error.. All of this translation [and buffering] takes time, so that's why there's a delay, and why you get silly sentences like "Cat a strawberry" when the word was Catastrophic..

It used to be that the ONLY places that could do real-time captioning were National Captioning Institute, in Virgiinia, WGBH in Boston, and Canadian Caption Development Agency in Toronto, so the court reporters doing it were the "best of the best" but now that PC caption software has become cheaper, any court reporter can pick up a job at the local fox station doing captions for the 10:00 news. I think the quality has suffered z bit, but it's GREAT that nearly everything is captioned these days...

Obviously I'm glad Sage supprots this now!! :-)

-Steve