# HR10-250 Closed Captions Experiment



## IneedCCs (Aug 25, 2006)

As many of you are aware, there have been threads on this forum (and other forums) in which many have expressed their problems with HD captioning on the HR10-250 (and HR20-750).

I filed a complaint with the FCC in September. Long story short -- I am working with a senior Customer Service Manager at DirecTV to resolve this problem. She has indicated that DTV's engineers did not see the problems I complained about, and has asked me to provide her with specific information about the programs I record and the problems I see. I am doing so, but thought it would be helpful if I could give her a link to a thread in which DTV subscribers with the HR10 gave their reports on the problems they saw with a specific program.

So, here's what I'm asking:

Record the first half-hour of "War of the Worlds" on Wednesday, 12/27 at 4:45 AM (ET) on HBOH channel 70. Then watch it and report on this thread specifically what problems you saw with the captions. I'm hoping that if I can point her to this thread DTV's engineers will be able to correct the problem.

Please limit your posts strictly to the reports requested. Please only report on the HR10 and only on the specific program referred to in the previous paragraph.

Thanks in advance for your help and input.


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## TomF (Apr 13, 2001)

I empathize with your CC problem, but my wife and I didn't even finish watching WotW when we rented it. I do hope that you're able to get some satisfaction from DirecTV.

Any other movie that you'd like to use as a test?


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## phox_mulder (Feb 23, 2006)

TomF said:


> but my wife and I didn't even finish watching WotW when we rented it.


I was able to finish it, but wished I hadn't.

I'll do the experiment, but time will tell how much I'll be able to rewatch. 

I'll try to stomach a half hour of it and keep notes on the captioning or lack thereof.

phox


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## IneedCCs (Aug 25, 2006)

TomF said:


> I empathize with your CC problem, but my wife and I didn't even finish watching WotW when we rented it. I do hope that you're able to get some satisfaction from DirecTV.
> 
> Any other movie that you'd like to use as a test?


I chose that movie because I wanted to choose a time when people's DVRs would be free, I didn't choose it for the movie. This is not about entertainment, it's about compiling data for DTV. I urge you to participate.


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## IneedCCs (Aug 25, 2006)

Follow-up (to all):

In all likelihood you won't have to watch the entire half-hour, if you have the same problems I'm having, you'll have plenty to report on after watching 15 minutes (if not less).

I would also ask that, if you're not hearing impaired, please watch without the audio on so you'll concentrate on the captions (or lack thereof).

I don't want to "lead the witness", but the problems I have which are rendering DTV's HD programming unwatchable are mainly two-fold: (1) A line of captioning will freeze on the screen for 10, 20 or 30 seconds, during which time dialogue continues but captioning of those lines of dialogue don't appear, all that is seen is that frozen line of captioning; eventually the frozen caption dissolves and normal captioning resumes (until the next bout of CC problems); and (2) Every other line of dialogue is uncaptioned or a stretch of several lines of dialogue are uncaptioned.

There are other problems, but those are the big ones.

Please be as specific as possible in describing the problems you see. If you see a line of dialogue freeze, recite the line of dialogue which froze, when it froze, how long it froze. Etc. I know that's burdensome, but that's the only way we're gonna get this problem corrected.

Thanks again for your input.


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## IneedCCs (Aug 25, 2006)

Final thought of the night:

For those who don't want to suffer through "War of the Worlds", please record and watch and report on "Pride & Prejudice", which is on on 12/28 at 6:30 AM (ET) on HBOH channel 70. I thought P&P was a pretty good movie, certainly a lot better than WotW.

Bottom line: Please watch and report on the first half-hour of either or both and post your reports here.

Thanks again.


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## leesweet (Mar 13, 2004)

I'm glad to help out on both to see how it goes, but a couple of comments: I've seen all of the issues stated (dropouts, frozen CC lines of text, etc.), but very infrequently. I'm wondering how one can tie it down to being D*'s fault or something they can fix vs. a normal glitch in the crappy common CC system? I normally watch mostly OTA, so this will be a good test of the satellite CC signal to see if there are any differneces.

Also, I wish someone would tackle why stations get away with broadcasting CC'd material but not the CC's, only on the exception that the station is 'new'. That rule exception was to exempt startups from some costs, not a network station for satellite clients like UHD, who obviously don't have any budget limitations! (I just checked Medical Investigation on UHD, right now, flagged as CC, and no captions.)


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## orinaccio (Sep 18, 2003)

Id be happy to participate. I wont be able to report on the results until after the new year, however, as I will be out of town. I will set the tivo to tape this show. 

EDIT: Where I am (PST) I note that War of the Worlds is on at 1:45, not 4:45. Did you get the time wrong perhaps? I set the tivo to tape this one

I just taped Waynes World a few days ago on HBO HD, to see if the CCs have improved in any way. Unfortunately its as terrible as ever. Waynes World happens to be one of my favorite comedies, and there were so many great comedic lines that were not captioned or ruined by missing/corrupted captions, it was painful to watch. 

I have a DVD burner that appears to be able to record the video as captioned, so if you can give me an address id be happy to compile 'the evidence' and make it available. I may be able to post it somewhere to give everyone an idea of how bad it is. 

Id also like to point out that even if 'only' 10% or 20% of the captions were corrupted, this is still highly unacceptable. Thats enough to ensure that at least some key dialogue will go uncaptioned, and in the case of comedies or thrillers, you can get really lost. If the audio cut out entire lines of dialogue that often, people would demand that heads roll.


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## IneedCCs (Aug 25, 2006)

leesweet said:


> I'm glad to help out on both to see how it goes, but a couple of comments: I've seen all of the issues stated (dropouts, frozen CC lines of text, etc.), but very infrequently. I'm wondering how one can tie it down to being D*'s fault or something they can fix vs. a normal glitch in the crappy common CC system? I normally watch mostly OTA, so this will be a good test of the satellite CC signal to see if there are any differneces.
> 
> Also, I wish someone would tackle why stations get away with broadcasting CC'd material but not the CC's, only on the exception that the station is 'new'. That rule exception was to exempt startups from some costs, not a network station for satellite clients like UHD, who obviously don't have any budget limitations! (I just checked Medical Investigation on UHD, right now, flagged as CC, and no captions.)


I have a few comments in response to your post.

First of all, the problems I've seen are not infrequent. I can bank on a movie on HBOH having missing lines of captions/frozen captions within ten minutes of the start of the movie. Every movie, every time.

In her letter to me, DTV's Customer Service Manager stated that all DTV's engineers saw were "captioning [dropping] out at a maximum two characters while viewing programming on HD. An example, 'We've got it' was viewed as 'We've g it'."

In effect, DTV has now conceded that the problem is their problem, as this statement confirms that DTV is receiving good, intelligible captions and those captions are being corrupted by DTV, either in their transmission to the subscriber or in their decoding in their STBs. In an earlier letter from DTV (before I filed my complaint with the FCC), the entry level clerical person who wrote the letter blamed the problem on the program providers (HBO and Showtime, etc.) and told me to write to them. In short, DTV tried to escape responsibility and pass the buck. But by her statement, quoted above, DTV has now admitted that it is receiving good, uncorrupted captioning data from the program providers. I don't know what the problem is, but this much is certain -- it's a DTV problem.

As for UHD -- don't get me started. This is a company with very deep pockets. How they get away with not providing captioned programming is beyond me. Their website states that their programming is not captioned, but will be "in the near future". It said that in early August and it says the same thing today. I e-mailed them and asked what "the near future" means; they haven't replied.


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## IneedCCs (Aug 25, 2006)

orinaccio said:


> Where I am (PST) I note that War of the Worlds is on at 1:45, not 4:45. Did you get the time wrong perhaps? I set the tivo to tape this one


That's the right one. The 4:45 is EST. I'm in NY.


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## leesweet (Mar 13, 2004)

Thanks for the update on D*'s response. Interesting they admit to that. Obviously, I could never tell where the chars were being dropped.

As for UHD, about a year ago, I went around and around with D* and the FCC on all the outstanding channels that weren't doing CC and should. UHD was one and the more major of them all, and 'escaped' on the 'new channels have xxx months' to set up to do CC exemption. BS when it's a major player, as we said. Fine when it's a 50KW local station somewhere... 

I never got an answer from D* as to why the guide data flat out lied and said the shows were CCd. Hm, well, they *were*, they just didn't get the CCs to air.  Note that a lot of the shows that UHD airs are previously shown NBC content, like L&Os and Medical Investigation, and the like. Of *course* these shows are captioned.

It's not the captions, it's the transmitting of the captions that they aren't doing, and I can't believe (yeah, of course I can...) that they are so cheap as to take legal advantage of a loophole to just not do this to defer an expense for a year or whatever the period is that the FCC allows 'new' stations to 'gear' up to do captions.


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## phox_mulder (Feb 23, 2006)

orinaccio said:


> EDIT: Where I am (PST) I note that War of the Worlds is on at 1:45, not 4:45. Did you get the time wrong perhaps? I set the tivo to tape this one


HBO-HD only has one feed, unlike the other SD HBO's.

4:45 Eastern = 3:45 Central = 2:45 Mountain = 1:45 Pacific.

HR10-250 set to record.

phox


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## IneedCCs (Aug 25, 2006)

leesweet said:


> Thanks for the update on D*'s response. Interesting they admit to that. Obviously, I could never tell where the chars were being dropped.


Just to be clear -- DTV didn't expressly admit to anything. But... as I said, in an earlier letter, which is what precipitated my filing a complaint with the FCC, they blamed the problem on the program providers and told me to write to HBO and Showtime.

The most recent letter, from which I quoted, above, flies in the face of that position and is tantamount to an admission that there's nothing wrong with the captioning data DTV is receiving from the program providers. That is, they can't argue, on the one hand, that it's the program providers' fault, while on the other hand saying the only problem they see on their HR10 is a few dropped characters, know what I mean?!

What will ultimately be done remains to be seen, but one thing's for sure -- the "it's the program providers" argument is off the table. It's a DTV problem. What that problem is remains to be seen, but it is clearly a DTV problem, and therefore DTV's legal responsibility to correct. (Under FCC Regulations, DTV is required to pass through captioning data intact.)


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## gusbear (Oct 24, 2004)

I'm amazed that the FCC's response to an issue that effects millions of disabled Americans is a fraction of their reaction to a brief glimpse of Janet Jackson's boob.

I used my camcorder to videotape about 1 minute of "Pride and Prejudice" today on HBOH, once with Digital Captions and once with standard Closed Captioning. In that 1 minute, the shortcomings of both CC methods becomes blatantly obvious and completely unacceptable. I spliced both to run simulataneously, and posted the video here:

http://idisk.mac.com/gus2000/Public/ccdemo.mov

I wish I could compare the DTV captioning to the same content OTA, but there are no channels common to both in my area.

Gus


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## leesweet (Mar 13, 2004)

I hope this doesn't end up 'forcing' D* to respond with 'it's all the HR10's fault, and it's an obsolete box, have an HR20'.... You mention the HR20 in the OP, and I haven't checkedL Are we posting a similar thread at dbstalk and/or AVS to get HR20 or non-DVRs? (Harder to check and recheck with a plain HD receiver, of course...) But, the more evidence, and especially details from the HR20, the better.


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## IneedCCs (Aug 25, 2006)

leesweet said:


> I hope this doesn't end up 'forcing' D* to respond with 'it's all the HR10's fault, and it's an obsolete box, have an HR20'.... You mention the HR20 in the OP, and I haven't checkedL Are we posting a similar thread at dbstalk and/or AVS to get HR20 or non-DVRs? (Harder to check and recheck with a plain HD receiver, of course...) But, the more evidence, and especially details from the HR20, the better.


I check DBSTalk from time to time and apparently the HR20 is having captioning issues, too.

My own personal opinion is that the problem lies in the signal, not the STB. But, I'm not an engineer. One of the main reasons I hold this opinion is the fact that if you re-play a segment of a program with bad captioning over and over, you see the exact same problem over and over. To me, that means it's in the signal. If it were a decoding problem, I would think that the captioning would be different each time you re-play the segment. That is to say, if the captioning data coming in to a deficient decoder were good, the bad decoder would display different captions each time the segment was re-played. In addition, the same decoder decodes HD captions for my OTA programs (i.e., the HR10 decodes my OTA HD captions, not my TV), and those captions are fine. Which leads me to believe the decoder is not the problem. Seeing the same exact bad captioning displayed over and over indicates, to me, that it's a case of a good decoder receiving corrupted captioning data.

Put another way -- garbage in, garbage out.

I haven't posted elsewhere. Taking it one step at a time. Just want to focus on the HR10 and HBOH for the moment. Hopefully, DTV will isolate the problem and be able to correct it across the board.

I've been at this since early August and it's been a long, arduous road, starting with "we haven't had any other complaints" to "it's the program providers" to where we are now. I've spent countless hours writing e-mails and letters.

All I want are intelligible captions. I have a beautiful HDTV and want to enjoy some HD programming. Except for CNN, I watch no SD programming. So, at this point I'm paying $50/month for DVR service. That's all I'm getting from DTV (until April, when baseball season starts).

But, it's not about the money. It's about getting movies (and other programming) in HD. That's why I invested in a HDTV, and why I've been relentless in trying to get this fixed (and will continue to do so). I will not rest until this is fixed.


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## jrosen1040 (Jan 10, 2004)

I'll be glad to help out. Do I need to turn on anything before recording in order to capture the captions, or do I just turn on captions when I watch the recording. Sorry for my ignorance, but I don't have any experience with closed caption usage.


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## phox_mulder (Feb 23, 2006)

You just have to turn on them on while watching.

There are two kinds that the HR10-250 decodes, analog and digital,
you want the digital since you are watching a HD program.

Captions are buried deep, deep within the video settings menu.


phox


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## leesweet (Mar 13, 2004)

phox, are you sure you need 'digital' for 'HD' CC? I'm not sure, but I think I've played with this and never saw a difference between analog and digital (and I sure expected to). I definitely could be wrong, and will check it out tonight or tomorrow...

My recollection is that a lot of the options that I expected to yield different results in CC didn't do squat. 

IneedCCs, I'm 100% on your side. I've been beating D* and the FCC about all this for years, and I've gotten what you have, especially about the 'new' HD channels.

Since I always thought the garbles were an inherent part of the crappy protocol/speed/no error checking, I'm glad to see you got *something* out of them, and will check both shows when they record this week. I'm just astonished D* hasn't pulled the 'obsolete hardware, get an HR20.  ' card yet. (For all the good it will do. I've see constant CC behavior on about six D* receivers (SD and HD, DVR and non...) over the past three years.


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## IneedCCs (Aug 25, 2006)

jrosen1040 said:


> I'll be glad to help out. Do I need to turn on anything before recording in order to capture the captions, or do I just turn on captions when I watch the recording. Sorry for my ignorance, but I don't have any experience with closed caption usage.


As others have stated, you don't have to do anything "special" when you record the programming, but when you watch it you'll have to turn the captioning on. Go to Settings/Video/Closed Captions and turn digital captions on (I think it's called DTVCC1).

Thanks for your help.


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## phox_mulder (Feb 23, 2006)

leesweet said:


> phox, are you sure you need 'digital' for 'HD' CC? I'm not sure, but I think I've played with this and never saw a difference between analog and digital (and I sure expected to). I definitely could be wrong, and will check it out tonight or tomorrow...


As far as the local stations via OTA antenna, I'm fairly sure you need the DTVCC1 turned on.

Not sure on the HD programming via DirecTV though, as technically, anything via DirecTV is digital.

I think they included both of them because HDMI doesn't pass the analog CC's to let the TV's decoder decode them, not sure on component though.

Of course, I could be wrong, and I'll be trying it out when I get home.

phox


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## leesweet (Mar 13, 2004)

Er, the TV has nothing to do with it, remember, for HD CC from an external box. (I assume (!) you mean OTA to an HR10....!)

The decoding's all in the receiver. The receiver converts the CC signal to the video overlay and ships the complete picture with CC on it to the display. 

I suspect the analog/digital options were an artifact from similar options from a *TV* that had a direct feed to an on-board ATSC tuner and an NTSC tuner, where you would need both options based on which feed you were using.

How's that sound? That's the best explanation I can come up with, and the most common confusion I've run into about where/when CC decoding actually takes place in D* equipment.


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## IneedCCs (Aug 25, 2006)

OK, I just watched "War of the Worlds", and here are the problems I saw with the captions:

Right off the bat, during the opening narration: line after "in a drop of water" not closed captioned (NCC)

"vast and cool and unsympathetic" read "unsympateticmpathetic"

"regarded our planet with unsympathetic eyes", next line NCC

5 minutes in "-Congratulations. - Thank you." Cruise's and Otto's brief lines which followed were NCC

"The door's locked. -Let me get it." Couple of lines which followed were NCC

only a half-line of dialogue "out of here next week"; after that a line or two were NCC

First line spoken by Otto in Fanning's room NCC

a few lines later, last word was "Sunday.oday.o"

8 minutes in "you.ou"

"Take care of our kids", then a half-line and a few more lines NCC

First line spoken by TV reporter NCC

11 in "What?", Fanning's line NCC

"Got a splinter", following line NCC

"You want me to take that out?", following line NCC

right after that, "Don't touch it. Dad!", then about 9 lines NCC (15 second stretch of no captioning)

right after that a couple of more lines NCC

more dropped lines and "Who's ther"

22 in: "Everybody, get out of the way! Everyone, back up." froze on the sreen for 15 seconds

I stopped watching at that point


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## Pyroto (Jul 29, 2002)

OK, I just watched "War of the Worlds", and the problems I had with the captions were what were already reported... namely, lots of dialog never got displayed as closed captions.

There were so many, but one specific, at 8 minutes in, was:

Cruise: you got nothing to worry about [CC displays this]
Cruise: listen, you tell your mom that Ray sends his love [CC does NOT display this line of dialog]
Mother: laughs and says "Right she'll love that" [CC displays this]

I could go on but let me just say that it must be incredibly frustrating for someone who must rely on closed captioning to watch a movie when so much dialog is just being dropped.

Good luck, I hope this helps in some small way.


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## phox_mulder (Feb 23, 2006)

leesweet said:


> Er, the TV has nothing to do with it, remember, for HD CC from an external box. (I assume (!) you mean OTA to an HR10....!)
> 
> The decoding's all in the receiver. The receiver converts the CC signal to the video overlay and ships the complete picture with CC on it to the display.
> 
> ...


This belongs in a different CC discussion, but I'll post it here anyway.

The HR10-250 is the first DirecTV DVR to have both Satellite and Antenna inputs, and be able to record both SD and HD programming.

Previous receivers and DVR's didn't care about captioning, all decoding and displaying was done by the TV's or an external Closed Caption decoder hooked to the TV, and all programming was SD which contained analog closed captioning.
Everything Closed Captioned was just passed along to the TV and it took care of it.

Now we have HD and ATSC which deals with captioning in a totally different way than previously.
With different choices how to see the new pictures, HD capable, HD ready, HD projectors, it became necessary for the HD receivers to take care of the captions.
Since the HR10 can record both HD and SD, it needs to be able to decode/display both analog and digital captions, passing it in the video to the display device.

My R10 had no closed captioning decoder in it, but programming recorded with it has closed captions, they are decoded and displayed by the TV.

My TV has built in analog and digital CC decoders, but the digital only works for programming tuned by it's internal tuner, analog works with any input source, or internal NTSC tuner.
Since the digital CC decoder only works with internally tuned programs, the externally tuned sources need to be able to decode and display the CC's themselves, thus the HR10-250 and TiVoSeries3 have built in CC decoders.

phox


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## IneedCCs (Aug 25, 2006)

Thanks, Pyroto, I greatly appreciate your taking the time to watch the movie and post your observations.


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## leesweet (Mar 13, 2004)

phox_mulder said:


> Since the HR10 can record both HD and SD, it needs to be able to decode/display both analog and digital captions, passing it in the video to the display device.


I assume this means what I said, that the box does the decoding, and that 'passing it in the video' means overlaying CC on the picture, with the display/TV doing no CC *except if it has a separate ATSC tuner for OTA and a separate input.

If so, we totally agree.


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## jrosen1040 (Jan 10, 2004)

I watched the first 10 minutes and had the exact same issues reported by ineedccs. 
Hard to believe that d* can't duplicate the problem.


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## IneedCCs (Aug 25, 2006)

Just watched the first half-hour of "Pride & Prejudice", which was also on HBOH channel 71.

As bad as "War of the Worlds" was, P&P was even worse. There were so many lines and half-lines of dialogue with dropped captions that I would literally have to recite virtually the entire script to state here with specificity what lines of captioning were missing. There were very few, if any, instances where there there were four consecutive lines of dialogue captioned. Dozens upon dozens of lines and half-lines of dialogue had missing captions.

In addition, there were a few lines of gibberish and, toward the end of the half-hour, there were quite a few lines of captions that "flashed" on the screen too quickly to be read.

I'll just point out two specific errors I saw, not because they're particularly problematic but because they're noteworthy:

13 minutes in the captions read "the b the beauty of teauty"

29 in the caption read "gaged" and flashed once; it was set against a blue background (not black, as it should be)


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## phox_mulder (Feb 23, 2006)

IneedCCs said:


> OK, I just watched "War of the Worlds", and here are the problems I saw with the captions:
> 
> Right off the bat, during the opening narration: line after "in a drop of water" not closed captioned (NCC)
> 
> ...


Exactly the same when I watched, even the "unsympateticmpathetic".

Rest of the 22 minutes was also duplicated precisely on my screen.

Watched for a few minutes more, not a lot of captions while the ground was moving, one "shouting" one "rumbling, there were a couple "watch out for the car", "look, the car" that wasn't captioned.

Once he got back to the house with all the people stuff on him, about every third line was not captioned when he was telling his kids to pack up so they could leave.

Nothing captioned after "Manny" wouldn't get in the car and was vaporized,

Manny: "bring the car back Ray, it's not my car" was captioned.
Numerous Ray: "Get down, get down, get down" no captions.
Dakota's character: "is it the terrorists?" not captioned.
More "get down, get down" a couple "holy ****'s", not captioned.
Nothing at all until they get to the highway then there's a "tires screeche" and "horns honking", then I stopped watching, 32 minutes in.

phox


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## IneedCCs (Aug 25, 2006)

Thanks, rosen, thanks phox. Your time and input are greatly appreciated!


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## chris_h (Dec 17, 2003)

Back when I used to have HB0-HD and SHO-HD, I saw these exact same types of problems. In a previous thread, I gave the information on the digital-CC corruption I was seeing in excruciating detail. I speculated at the time that this was some sort of single-bit corruption in the digital CC data stream, originating at D*.

Here is the thread:
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=307200&page=2

Back then (september 2006), D* was still pointing fingers at others for this problem, and was not very responsive to IneedCCs' queries. I am glad to hear they have finally woken up. It really bothered me that D* was ignoring the CC problems of a user that needs them, regardless of the fact that the FCC mandates clean CCs. It's not like digital TV is something new.

I hope the fact that multiple users in this thread are seeing the exact same corruption on this movie will convince D* to put the necessary engineering resources to task and to solve this problem. I hope your senior CSM has the needed juice to make it so.


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## willgetin (Dec 23, 2005)

Wow. Watching HD football, on 73, its pretty much non existent from the start...


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## IneedCCs (Aug 25, 2006)

willgetin said:


> Wow. Watching HD football, on 73, its pretty much non existent from the start...


Yeah, you're right.

When I initially registered my complaint with DTV in August and then eventually filed a Complaint with the FCC about the captioning problems on DTV's HD channels, I specifically pointed out that the captions were fine on ESPN-HD and ESPN2-HD, which was the case back in September. I pointed out that those channels are captioned in real-time, which might be why they weren't experiencing the captioning problems on all of the other DTV HD channels.

I cancelled my subscriptions to HBO, SHO and the HD package in October, didn't see the point in subscribing to programming which was unwatchable due to the unintelligible captions.

I just resumed my subscriptions so I could provide DTV with specific information about the captioning errors I was seeing, as requested by DTV. I was shocked (and, frankly, disgusted) to see that ESPN and ESPN-2 had totally gone south -- as you pointed out, there are virtually _no_ captions on those channels now! All you get is an occasional word or two popping up on the screen. For all intents and purposes, there are _no_ captions now on the ESPN-HD channels.

DirecTV is going in the wrong direction.


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## gusbear (Oct 24, 2004)

I concur completely with the "War of the World" observations. I've assembled video clips of those bad spots here:

http://idisk.mac.com/gus2000/Public/ccdemo2.mov

I also have it Windows Media format for those of you that are QT-deficient:

http://idisk.mac.com/gus2000/Public/ccdemo2.wmv

The "Pride and Prejudice" video I posted earlier is even worse. It's almost like the transcript was taken with an Apple Newton!


Gus


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## berryb (Jun 22, 2002)

I also need CC's and have experienced many of the same problems mentioned: frozen blocks of CC, missing words, etc.

BUT, I've stopped watching ABC's HD programs completely, (Los Angeles channel 87)switching over to another TiVo and SD recordings. In my experience, my local ABC's HD Closed-Captioning is by for the worst I've received.

Has anyone else noticed this problem? Is it possible in this case it's the station, or am I imgining things and it's just DTV and a HR10-250 problem?

Thanx!


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## IneedCCs (Aug 25, 2006)

berryb said:


> I also need CC's and have experienced many of the same problems mentioned: frozen blocks of CC, missing words, etc.
> 
> BUT, I've stopped watching ABC's HD programs completely, (Los Angeles channel 87)switching over to another TiVo and SD recordings. In my experience, my local ABC's HD Closed-Captioning is by for the worst I've received.
> 
> ...


I'm at something at a loss as to how to respond, other than to say that I get my locals OTA (they're not available on DTV yet) and I have no problems with my ABC affiliate (I'm in upstate NY). Both "live" using my TV's tuner and decoder and through my HR10's tuner/TiVo, the captions are fine.

So, we can rule out the network. Which means it's either your local (KABC?), or DTV is corrupting the captioning data it receives from that station. Or it's the STB.

If you can get KABC OTA, see if the CCs are bad OTA. If they're OK, that means it's a DTV problem, either the STB or they're corrupting the captioning data.


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## Joe Jensen (Jul 7, 2003)

Stupid question deleted....joe


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## berryb (Jun 22, 2002)

IneedCCs said:


> If you can get KABC OTA, see if the CCs are bad OTA. If they're OK, that means it's a DTV problem, either the STB or they're corrupting the captioning data.


Unfortunately, we're out in the Boonies, only 35 miles North of downtown LA, but with mountains between here, there and Mt. Wilson, the TV Antenna Farm for Southern California. I did stick up an OTA antenna for awhile before we got the HD TiVo but could only receive KNBC-HD reliably. And w/o TiVo, who watches (even HD) 'live' TV?

I've toyed with the idea of putting dual-OTA antennas back up, for twice the signal-strength. Perhaps then I could TiVo some of the other local HD stations.  Maybe one of these days . . .

I was happy to see this thread. The 'captioning' thing has been plaguing me for some time now, but I thought it was just a local problem! Thanks for your pressuring the FCC; DTV, etc! Maybe they'll eventually solve the CC problem, given enough interest in it! 
:up:


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