1 00:00:00,080 --> 00:00:06,597 Did you know that DVDs have two very different  kinds of captioning data stored on them? 2 00:00:06,597 --> 00:00:14,408 If you didn’t, don’t feel bad because it turns out a  whole lot of folks in charge of making things which play DVDs 3 00:00:14,408 --> 00:00:22,865 forgot about that second one and in 2025 they largely no longer work (or at least not without some pretty big headaches). 4 00:00:22,865 --> 00:00:24,315 Take a look at this. 5 00:00:24,315 --> 00:00:31,617 I have this Blu-ray disc player from 2009 connected to this TV over an HDMI connection. 6 00:00:31,617 --> 00:00:34,804 Like most Blu-ray players it will also play DVDs, 7 00:00:34,804 --> 00:00:41,274 and it wears the DVD-Video compatibility mark to assure us it supports all of DVD’s features. 8 00:00:41,274 --> 00:00:42,869 Like subtitles. 9 00:00:42,869 --> 00:00:47,234 And if I press the subtitle button on its remote, they appear. 10 00:00:47,234 --> 00:00:50,337 In fact I’ve got several choices of subtitles available, 11 00:00:50,337 --> 00:00:57,720 including a few different languages and a second set of English subtitles for the filmmaker commentary track. 12 00:00:57,720 --> 00:00:59,153 Yeah, remember those? 13 00:00:59,153 --> 00:01:01,523 Physical media had perks! 14 00:01:01,523 --> 00:01:03,766 But now, take a look at this. 15 00:01:03,766 --> 00:01:09,745 This is a box set of Perry Mason DVDs which I purchased because, if it wasn’t obvious enough, 16 00:01:09,745 --> 00:01:12,187 I am an old soul. 17 00:01:12,187 --> 00:01:18,816 And like most DVD packaging, it contains a basic overview of the technical details and features of the discs. 18 00:01:18,816 --> 00:01:26,980 Right here we see the classic “closed captioning” CC mark which indicates these discs contain English captions. 19 00:01:26,980 --> 00:01:33,730 Yet when I play these discs  in this Blu-ray player and hit the subtitle button on its remote… 20 00:01:33,730 --> 00:01:35,813 nothing happens. 21 00:01:35,813 --> 00:01:44,424 The Blu-ray player simply ignores that button as if it’s completely unaware of the fact that these discs contain closed captioning. 22 00:01:44,424 --> 00:01:48,211 Except, and here’s what’s weird about this situation, 23 00:01:48,211 --> 00:01:52,109 it knows they’re there and is correctly decoding them. 24 00:01:52,109 --> 00:01:55,498 In fact it’s doing it right now. 25 00:01:55,498 --> 00:02:03,806 See, HDMI was still relatively newfangled in 2009 so this Blu-ray player sports analog video outputs. 26 00:02:03,806 --> 00:02:07,258 Including basic composite video. 27 00:02:07,258 --> 00:02:15,271 As luck would have it, this cheap Walmart TV  happens to have a composite video input and if I switch over to that… 28 00:02:15,271 --> 00:02:17,099 well there they are. 29 00:02:17,099 --> 00:02:26,115 And they’re fantastic captions - word-for-word perfect plus they’re making excellent use of positioning to help indicate which character is speaking 30 00:02:26,115 --> 00:02:31,756 (a feature, by the way, which is still missing from YouTube’s native captioning tool). 31 00:02:31,756 --> 00:02:36,799 Really wish they’d spend a little more time making that better and easier to use. 32 00:02:36,799 --> 00:02:41,129 Anyway, since we can see the  captions on the composite input, 33 00:02:41,129 --> 00:02:46,799 why does the Blu-ray player behave as if there are no subtitles on these discs? 34 00:02:46,880 --> 00:02:50,837 Well that’s because there are no subtitles on these discs. 35 00:02:50,837 --> 00:02:53,544 But there are closed captions. 36 00:02:53,544 --> 00:02:59,724 And the Blu-ray player is actually handling them exactly as a DVD player should. 37 00:02:59,724 --> 00:03:04,373 The only problem is it will never show them to us. 38 00:03:04,373 --> 00:03:07,986 See, these captions? They’re not part of the image. 39 00:03:07,986 --> 00:03:15,221 In fact they’re being generated by this TV from  a stream of text data which was extracted from the disc by the Blu-ray player 40 00:03:15,221 --> 00:03:24,325 and then snuck into a non-visible portion of the analog video signal coming out of that jack and only that jack. 41 00:03:24,325 --> 00:03:30,312 Which means if you’re living in 2025 and using the HDMI or even the component output, 42 00:03:30,312 --> 00:03:33,828 these captions simply do not work. 43 00:03:33,828 --> 00:03:42,396 This might seem pretty ridiculous, but DVD is an old format which was designed to behave in some old-fashioned ways. 44 00:03:42,396 --> 00:03:44,618 Which leads me to some distressing news: 45 00:03:44,618 --> 00:03:48,592 next year, the DVD will turn 30. 46 00:03:49,398 --> 00:03:51,762 Yep. Don’t like it but it’s true. 47 00:03:51,762 --> 00:03:57,485 And when it first hit the scene in 1996, the world was still very analog. 48 00:03:57,485 --> 00:04:02,598 Consumer television sets (even really high-end ones) didn’t have digital video inputs, 49 00:04:02,598 --> 00:04:11,673 and cheaper TVs didn’t even have composite inputs - necessitating the use of an RF modulator like this one if you wanted to hook up the Playstation. 50 00:04:11,673 --> 00:04:15,164 That is if you didn’t run it through the VCR which would have one of those built-in. 51 00:04:15,164 --> 00:04:21,179 But anyway, because of this reality DVD was in many respects a bridge technology. 52 00:04:21,179 --> 00:04:29,887 Outside of satellite television and a few exotic camcorders, it was the first way to get broadcast-quality digital video in the home. 53 00:04:29,887 --> 00:04:41,238 But, since nobody had digital TV sets, DVD players needed to convert the digital video data stored on the disc into the analog video signal that a television expects. 54 00:04:41,238 --> 00:04:51,181 And here in the United States, one of the things a TV in 1996 expected to see in that analog video signal is closed captioning data. 55 00:04:51,181 --> 00:04:56,545 If it was there, and the user wanted them, the TV would display the captions. 56 00:04:56,545 --> 00:05:02,920 This tech is much older than the DVD, and had become fairly well established by the time DVD hit the market - 57 00:05:02,920 --> 00:05:08,343 in fact television sets were required to support closed captioning in 1993, 58 00:05:08,343 --> 00:05:15,565 and caption decoders for over-the-air television broadcasts had been commercially available since 1980. 59 00:05:15,565 --> 00:05:18,295 How does it work? I’ll happily show you, 60 00:05:18,295 --> 00:05:25,912 but I made a video about this technology and its history back in 2018, so I’ll only provide a very basic overview here. 61 00:05:25,912 --> 00:05:28,708 If you’d like to learn more - clicky thing. 62 00:05:28,708 --> 00:05:37,146 In brief, analog television worked by very quickly and repeatedly scanning an electron beam across the face of a cathode-ray tube 63 00:05:37,146 --> 00:05:41,682 in order to produce a whole bunch of glowing horizontal lines. 64 00:05:41,682 --> 00:05:50,807 That pattern of lines is known as a raster, and an image could be produced by varying the brightness (and color) of those lines as they were drawn. 65 00:05:50,807 --> 00:05:55,125 Oldfangled television receivers generate their own raster locally, 66 00:05:55,125 --> 00:06:06,268 so we needed a way to synchronize incoming video signals to the local circuitry in the television so the transmitted images could be assembled correctly and appear stable. 67 00:06:06,268 --> 00:06:16,702 This was done by periodically cutting the signal to zero which would reset the television’s scanning beam and synchronize its raster with the incoming signal. 68 00:06:16,702 --> 00:06:21,147 We called these periods of zero intensity blanking intervals, 69 00:06:21,147 --> 00:06:30,720 and the vertical blanking interval signaled the start of each individual video image by zeroing out the signal for 20 or so video lines. 70 00:06:30,720 --> 00:06:36,184 Now in ye-old days, the image on the screen literally was the video signal, 71 00:06:36,184 --> 00:06:43,849 which means the electron guns at the back of the picture  tube which actually draw the images also drew those synchronization signals - 72 00:06:43,849 --> 00:06:46,609 and they would appear as black bars. 73 00:06:46,609 --> 00:06:53,693 But television receivers were set up to deliberately stretch the image slightly beyond the edges of the screen. 74 00:06:53,693 --> 00:07:01,489 This was known as overscan and it made sure the image  filled the entire screen and that the blanking intervals weren’t visible. 75 00:07:01,489 --> 00:07:06,303 Now, there was never anything in the blanking interval - it’s blank. 76 00:07:06,303 --> 00:07:12,103 But we eventually realized that we didn’t need  quite as many lines to be blank as we thought. 77 00:07:12,103 --> 00:07:21,661 We could actually stick a little something extra in one of those blank lines and a TV receiver would still synchronize with the incoming signal just fine. 78 00:07:21,661 --> 00:07:33,731 So line 21 took on a new role: in 1976 it officially stopped being the end of the vertical blanking interval and instead became a data stream. 79 00:07:33,731 --> 00:07:35,397 This is what it looks like. 80 00:07:35,397 --> 00:07:41,490 In this recycled footage I’ve messed with the controls on this black-and-white TV to shrink the height of the image 81 00:07:41,490 --> 00:07:45,753 which allows us to see the normally-obscured vertical blanking interval. 82 00:07:45,753 --> 00:07:49,184 And in the last video line before the image starts, 83 00:07:49,184 --> 00:07:57,121 we see a set of white dashes followed by wider  white and black bars which periodically flash in odd patterns. 84 00:07:57,121 --> 00:08:05,975 To us this looks like a visual effect, but to the right decoder chip this is a signal repeatedly going between high and low in set patterns - 85 00:08:05,975 --> 00:08:09,184 and thus, it’s a binary data stream. 86 00:08:09,184 --> 00:08:19,099 Multiple things could be done with this data stream but here in the US it was mainly used to transmit EIA-608 caption data. 87 00:08:19,099 --> 00:08:23,377 That’s a mouthful so from now on I’ll be calling it line 21 captions. 88 00:08:23,377 --> 00:08:33,463 And it was up to the TV (or a decoder box like this) to decode this bitstream and display the encoded text on the television screen when requested. 89 00:08:33,463 --> 00:08:41,483 This technology was basic and quite low-bandwidth,  but it was extremely robust and worked properly with poor television reception 90 00:08:41,483 --> 00:08:44,663 and with home video formats like VHS. 91 00:08:44,663 --> 00:08:55,919 In fact, here’s a TV from 1994 playing a tape recorded from  over-the-air TV in the lowest quality SLP mode and still the captions work perfectly. 92 00:08:55,919 --> 00:08:59,080 So, where does DVD fit into this? 93 00:08:59,080 --> 00:09:07,990 Well, it entered a landscape where line 21 caption decoders had existed for over a decade and were now mandated by law. 94 00:09:07,990 --> 00:09:18,454 And prior home video formats like VHS, Betamax, Laserdisc, and even RCA’s ill-fated CED had supported closed captioning. 95 00:09:18,454 --> 00:09:24,710 Since the folks who relied on captioning were used to a  system where the captions were simply built into the video signal 96 00:09:24,710 --> 00:09:31,110 and either their TV or their caption decoder would just… work whenever captioning was available, 97 00:09:31,110 --> 00:09:37,748 the DVD standard required DVD players  sold in markets which use the NTSC television standard 98 00:09:37,748 --> 00:09:44,398 to transmit line 21 caption data in their video output whenever they are playing a disc. 99 00:09:44,398 --> 00:09:53,807 The text, timing, and positioning data for the captions is stored on the disc in the group-of-pictures headers found in the MPEG-2 video stream, 100 00:09:53,807 --> 00:10:02,658 and as part of the digital-to-analog conversion process, a DVD player will extract that data and spit it out over line 21. 101 00:10:02,658 --> 00:10:09,549 Then, without doing anything extra, any TV with a caption decoder could display the captions on the disc 102 00:10:09,549 --> 00:10:14,839 in exactly the same fashion as every other video source it might encounter. 103 00:10:14,839 --> 00:10:22,695 Now, I had always assumed that the main reason  this was done was for backward compatibility and ease of access. 104 00:10:22,695 --> 00:10:30,805 See, the DVD format also included a completely new version of closed captioning which it called subtitles. 105 00:10:30,805 --> 00:10:37,555 Side-note: if you insist on being pedantic, subtitles and captions have different definitions and purposes. 106 00:10:37,555 --> 00:10:45,343 Sticklers will insist that captions need to include both dialogue and anything audible, like the noise of a telephone ringing, 107 00:10:45,343 --> 00:10:51,457 while subtitles should only display spoken  dialogue or translations into other languages. 108 00:10:51,457 --> 00:10:58,958 But when it comes to the technology and what it does, line 21 captions and DVD subtitles are doing the same thing. 109 00:10:58,958 --> 00:11:04,102 They’re both a form of text information which is hidden until the user selects it. 110 00:11:04,102 --> 00:11:08,533 That’s, by the way, why closed captions are called closed. 111 00:11:08,533 --> 00:11:15,753 The DVD format just calls its version of that concept subtitles,  which happens to be a convenient distinction. 112 00:11:15,753 --> 00:11:20,322 However, there are significant technical differences between the two. 113 00:11:20,322 --> 00:11:28,702 For one, DVD-video allows for up to 32 subtitle tracks, which is why we had all those different language options at the beginning. 114 00:11:28,702 --> 00:11:35,994 Line 21 captions technically have four concurrent data streams and support multiple languages, 115 00:11:35,994 --> 00:11:40,827 but the bandwidth limitation meant in practice there were at most two options. 116 00:11:40,827 --> 00:11:45,415 So DVD subtitles could handle much, much more information. 117 00:11:45,415 --> 00:11:51,505 And DVD subtitles aren’t just more plentiful,  they’re also not stored on the disc as text. 118 00:11:51,505 --> 00:11:57,416 In fact these are bitmap images that the DVD player will display on top of the video. 119 00:11:57,416 --> 00:12:06,441 This allowed for the use of any colors, fonts, and languages you can imagine so it had lots of advantages over the standard text blocks of closed captions 120 00:12:06,441 --> 00:12:09,355 and could be used in many different ways. 121 00:12:09,355 --> 00:12:16,766 Despite those advantages, DVD subtitles required learning a new system which not everyone would want to do. 122 00:12:16,766 --> 00:12:23,766 In fact, if I remember right, my family’s first DVD player didn’t have a dedicated button on its remote control for turning on subtitles 123 00:12:23,766 --> 00:12:29,576 and you had to navigate through the clunky DVD menus to enable them. 124 00:12:29,576 --> 00:12:34,003 Designers were having a little too much fun with those in the early days of DVD. 125 00:12:34,003 --> 00:12:36,520 So if you regularly used captions, 126 00:12:36,520 --> 00:12:46,235 DVD subtitles could be much more annoying than having your TV just… do it whenever it’s getting a video signal as it always had before. 127 00:12:46,235 --> 00:12:52,377 I suspect that’s the main reason the DVD standard wanted to support line 21 captions. 128 00:12:52,377 --> 00:12:55,959 It was simple enough to implement them so there  really wasn’t a good reason not to, 129 00:12:55,959 --> 00:13:05,761 and, when closed captions are part of the output signal, it would make accessible television broadcasts from a DVD source much more technically straightforward. 130 00:13:05,761 --> 00:13:08,614 Just shove it into the transmitter. 131 00:13:08,614 --> 00:13:18,627 But I didn’t realize until I bought my Perry Mason box set that there were DVDs out there which ONLY support line 21 closed captions. 132 00:13:18,627 --> 00:13:22,533 I’ve gone on to find plenty of other examples among my DVDs - 133 00:13:22,533 --> 00:13:30,677 it seems a lot of DVD releases of TV shows simply put the same closed caption data from the television broadcast on the discs 134 00:13:30,677 --> 00:13:34,485 and they never got converted to a subtitle track. 135 00:13:34,485 --> 00:13:39,783 In 2025, this presents an interesting accessibility problem. 136 00:13:39,783 --> 00:13:48,161 See, the DVD standard quite correctly envisioned that line 21 captions would simply always be happening in the background. 137 00:13:48,161 --> 00:13:54,026 There’s no way to turn them on or off because that is handled by the television. 138 00:13:54,026 --> 00:14:00,082 But as time has marched on, people aren’t using analog video connections so much. 139 00:14:00,082 --> 00:14:05,641 And as this Blu-ray disc player shows us, that has led to some oversights. 140 00:14:05,641 --> 00:14:09,129 See, HDMI doesn’t carry caption data. 141 00:14:09,129 --> 00:14:19,099 Notice how the Accessibility and Captions option in this TV’s menu changes to simply “Accessibility” when I switch from the composite input to the HDMI input - 142 00:14:19,099 --> 00:14:23,599 and yes, I checked, there are no caption options in that submenu. 143 00:14:23,599 --> 00:14:34,950 This means if I play my Perry Mason DVDs on this Blu-ray player and I have it hooked up to my TV via HDMI, the captions simply don’t work. 144 00:14:34,950 --> 00:14:41,023 Which is kinda bonkers if you think about it  because this Blu-ray player sees the caption data! 145 00:14:41,023 --> 00:14:47,306 It has to get it from the DVD in order to  inject it into line 21 of its composite video output - 146 00:14:47,306 --> 00:14:48,970 which it is doing! 147 00:14:48,970 --> 00:14:52,931 So it’s not only aware that there are captions on this disc it's playing, 148 00:14:52,931 --> 00:14:55,480 it’s actively decoding them. 149 00:14:55,480 --> 00:14:57,889 But during the design phase nobody thought 150 00:14:57,889 --> 00:15:05,927 “well we’d better figure out a way for the Blu-ray player to render those captions on-screen for those using HDMI or component video” 151 00:15:05,927 --> 00:15:10,502 which means the captions on many discs appear to be broken. 152 00:15:10,502 --> 00:15:14,597 They’re not - as we know, because… there they are. 153 00:15:14,597 --> 00:15:22,963 But should anyone want to enjoy the benefits of upscaling and watch their DVDs through the same cable that they watch their Blu-ray discs, 154 00:15:22,963 --> 00:15:26,002 well they’re not getting captions from this thing. 155 00:15:26,002 --> 00:15:34,488 Quick tangent - if you’ve not seen a well-mastered DVD being played on a Blu-ray player (or an upscaling DVD player) 156 00:15:34,488 --> 00:15:37,931 then you’ve not seen how good DVDs can look. 157 00:15:37,931 --> 00:15:50,188 Yes, the resolution of the video is only 720X480 which means, technically, the DVD only stores the same number of pixels as YouTube set to 480P. 158 00:15:50,188 --> 00:15:54,158 But in practice the image quality is miles better than that. 159 00:15:54,158 --> 00:16:02,727 I have a lot of movies on DVD that I will happily  watch on my 4K OLED TV because they still look pretty good. 160 00:16:02,727 --> 00:16:12,094 Obviously not as good as Blu-ray or most streaming video services, but it’s way better than a format from 1996 has any right to be. 161 00:16:12,094 --> 00:16:17,042 Heck, even the film grain comes through on these Perry Mason DVDs. 162 00:16:17,042 --> 00:16:21,867 There’s a reason new DVD releases are still happening - it’s a fine format, 163 00:16:21,867 --> 00:16:30,143 and honestly I’m really enjoying getting back into the experience of "here’s a thing, it has the movie on it, and I put the thing in the player and watch it - 164 00:16:30,143 --> 00:16:31,946 no internet required!" 165 00:16:31,946 --> 00:16:34,793 Plus, I have the thing! 166 00:16:34,793 --> 00:16:40,240 Seasons 6-9 aren’t going to disappear like they did from Paramount +. 167 00:16:40,240 --> 00:16:42,301 But back to the captions. 168 00:16:42,301 --> 00:16:48,719 The inability of this Blu-ray player to display them sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. 169 00:16:48,719 --> 00:16:58,963 It’s understandable that a Blu-ray disc player from 2009 which still has a composite video output would not have a way to render line 21 captions on its own. 170 00:16:58,963 --> 00:17:04,027 Worst case scenario you do what I did here and hook it up to your TV twice: 171 00:17:04,027 --> 00:17:09,562 use the HDMI (or component) output for Blu-rays and DVDs with subtitles 172 00:17:09,562 --> 00:17:17,889 and then switch over to the composite input on your TV whenever you run across a DVD which only has closed captions. 173 00:17:17,889 --> 00:17:22,727 It’s not an ideal experience, and it’s also something you’re  just gonna have to figure out on your own 174 00:17:22,727 --> 00:17:28,192 since this whole compatibility problem isn’t mentioned anywhere in this thing's user manual, 175 00:17:28,192 --> 00:17:31,653 but at least it makes some flavor of sense. 176 00:17:31,653 --> 00:17:35,641 HDMI is a new cable which doesn’t work like the old one. 177 00:17:35,641 --> 00:17:36,901 Get used to it. 178 00:17:36,901 --> 00:17:42,271 But, uh, a check of the calendar reveals 2009 was 16 years ago 179 00:17:42,271 --> 00:17:50,504 and there are plenty of Blu-ray players out there which don’t have any analog connections because time has passed. 180 00:17:50,504 --> 00:17:54,146 Like, for instance, this 3D Blu-ray player. 181 00:17:54,146 --> 00:17:57,398 It’s like a Blu-ray player, but twice! 182 00:17:57,398 --> 00:18:03,800 It’s only got an HDMI output so line 21 captions are definitely not going to work. 183 00:18:03,800 --> 00:18:11,577 However, it’s got that DVD-video logo on there  (you can barely see it but it’s there) and it will play DVDs. 184 00:18:11,577 --> 00:18:17,896 Did Sony think of what would happen when someone wants to watch a DVD like this and turn on captions? 185 00:18:17,896 --> 00:18:19,995 No they did not. 186 00:18:19,995 --> 00:18:25,044 The subtitle button doesn’t do anything, and the options menu reveals nothing helpful. 187 00:18:25,044 --> 00:18:26,667 Great job! 188 00:18:26,667 --> 00:18:30,121 Now, granted, this is a Blu-ray player. 189 00:18:30,121 --> 00:18:35,708 It’s not selling itself as a DVD player, that’s just a feature it offers for convenience. 190 00:18:35,708 --> 00:18:40,982 But, you can still purchase new DVD players in a store. 191 00:18:40,982 --> 00:18:44,063 And so, for science, I did. 192 00:18:45,287 --> 00:18:46,738 And I bought two of them. 193 00:18:46,738 --> 00:18:53,855 One of them is Walmart’s ONN brand and was priced at $35, which is about what I would expect. 194 00:18:53,855 --> 00:18:58,802 And the other is a Sony which was $55. 195 00:18:58,802 --> 00:19:07,999 That’s too much to spend on a DVD player but I did it anyway because in 2025, there are lots of TVs out there which don’t have composite inputs. 196 00:19:07,999 --> 00:19:09,482 Including mine. 197 00:19:09,482 --> 00:19:15,494 And both of these DVD players have HDMI outputs because that is how we do video now. 198 00:19:15,494 --> 00:19:22,826 So, did anyone during the design process of these machines remember about those closed captions on DVDs? 199 00:19:22,826 --> 00:19:24,957 Only one way to find out! 200 00:19:25,040 --> 00:19:26,695 Starting with the Walmart one, 201 00:19:26,695 --> 00:19:30,843 this thing’s power cord ends in a USB plug which is amazing. 202 00:19:30,843 --> 00:19:38,066 Also amazing? It actually has a numerical display on the front to show status and runtime. 203 00:19:38,066 --> 00:19:44,042 That is a very surprising thing to see on one of these cheap little DVD players, but it’s welcome. 204 00:19:44,042 --> 00:19:49,129 I don’t necessarily need it to say OFF whenever it’s off but I’ll take it. 205 00:19:49,129 --> 00:19:53,500 So - does this have a way to display closed captions? 206 00:19:53,500 --> 00:19:55,130 No. 207 00:19:55,130 --> 00:20:02,684 Pressing the subtitle button simply causes it to say “invalid entry” and there’s nothing in its settings - or its documentation 208 00:20:02,684 --> 00:20:07,677 - to suggest it will ever display those captions on the screen. 209 00:20:07,677 --> 00:20:16,777 But it does have a composite output and — of course — it’s sending the caption data out of there exactly as it should. 210 00:20:16,777 --> 00:20:22,251 However, if I were to use a composite-to-HDMI adapter, captions would not come through. 211 00:20:22,251 --> 00:20:28,872 So, unless your TV happens to have a composite input you're not using, you’re completely out of luck. 212 00:20:28,872 --> 00:20:38,347 But in fairness, if we pretend it’s the year 2002 this is a perfectly cromulent DVD player which has this weird extra port for some reason. 213 00:20:38,347 --> 00:20:42,272 Actually, quick note about composite to HDMI adapters. 214 00:20:42,272 --> 00:20:47,640 These things are cheap, widely available and they generally work shockingly well. 215 00:20:47,640 --> 00:20:55,975 Converting analog video to a digital grid of pixels is hard enough, and converting interlaced video is even harder, 216 00:20:55,975 --> 00:21:01,289 yet the video these things put out of their HDMI port is generally great. 217 00:21:01,289 --> 00:21:08,281 It’s remarkable that we’ve got that down to a commodity chipset, and you can pick these up for less than $20. 218 00:21:08,281 --> 00:21:15,498 But as far as I can tell, none of them will decode and render line 21 captions. 219 00:21:15,498 --> 00:21:23,030 This feels like a miss, and I hope somebody out there will build that feature into one of these with a toggle to turn captions on and off. 220 00:21:23,030 --> 00:21:28,358 I really don’t like that we’ve just abandoned the deaf and hard of hearing community here. 221 00:21:28,358 --> 00:21:34,640 It’s old tech, yes, but it works and there’s no reason we shouldn’t expect it to keep working. 222 00:21:34,640 --> 00:21:38,026 But now let’s see if the Sony one does any better. 223 00:21:38,026 --> 00:21:42,287 I have higher hopes for this guy because of something I’ll show you in a bit but… 224 00:21:42,287 --> 00:21:43,587 no. 225 00:21:43,587 --> 00:21:45,331 Same exact story. 226 00:21:45,331 --> 00:21:54,260 Subtitle button doesn’t do anything, there’s nothing in the options mentioning closed captions, and the documentation is completely mum about this. 227 00:21:54,260 --> 00:22:01,452 But it has a composite output  and the caption data is correctly being sent out on line 21. 228 00:22:01,452 --> 00:22:08,485 So both of these DVD players  will correctly do closed captions so long as you’re in 1996 229 00:22:08,485 --> 00:22:13,105 but neither one thought to update that functionality for 2025. 230 00:22:13,105 --> 00:22:14,885 Great work, folks! 231 00:22:14,885 --> 00:22:17,230 But then a thought occurred to me: 232 00:22:17,230 --> 00:22:20,150 is this actually a new problem? 233 00:22:20,150 --> 00:22:23,359 And it turns out - not really! 234 00:22:23,359 --> 00:22:27,384 This is a portable DVD player from 2005. 235 00:22:27,384 --> 00:22:32,282 These were everywhere for a hot minute and, since they have their own built-in displays, 236 00:22:32,282 --> 00:22:36,686 you would think it should be able to display the captions on these discs. 237 00:22:36,686 --> 00:22:38,224 But can it? 238 00:22:38,224 --> 00:22:39,588 Nope! 239 00:22:39,588 --> 00:22:46,855 On discs with subtitles it can display them, of course (though they aren’t super readable thanks to its pretty low-resolution display) 240 00:22:46,855 --> 00:22:50,566 but it has no ability to display closed captions. 241 00:22:50,566 --> 00:22:58,045 Which is extra frustrating because it’s got a composite video output on the back and if you hook this up to a TV - 242 00:22:58,045 --> 00:23:01,316 well the TV will decode them just fine. 243 00:23:01,316 --> 00:23:10,034 So somewhere in the logic of this thing it’s extracting the caption data and correctly injecting it into its composite output, 244 00:23:10,034 --> 00:23:14,575 but if you want to see them on the device itself you’re out of luck. 245 00:23:14,575 --> 00:23:17,374 Seems like a pretty big oversight to me! 246 00:23:17,374 --> 00:23:22,761 But, OK, these things are really just cheap DVD  players with a monitor strapped onto them 247 00:23:22,761 --> 00:23:30,981 and DVD players were never designed to display the closed captions - they just had to inject them into the video output for a TV which, 248 00:23:30,981 --> 00:23:38,803 since this can do, means that arguably there’s nothing wrong with it but it's still a pretty big accessibility failure, don’t you think? 249 00:23:40,087 --> 00:23:47,632 But in 2005 we also watched DVDs on our computers, at least those of us with a DVD-ROM drive. 250 00:23:47,632 --> 00:23:51,420 Do they know what to do with the closed captions? 251 00:23:51,420 --> 00:23:55,027 Well, it turns out that answer is pretty complicated. 252 00:23:55,027 --> 00:23:57,625 In the past, this worked great. 253 00:23:57,625 --> 00:24:01,682 I fired up this Windows XP machine and good ol’ Windows Media Player. 254 00:24:01,682 --> 00:24:08,960 And sure enough, there’s a setting in the options menu to turn  on closed captions and they work exactly as you’d expect.   255 00:24:08,960 --> 00:24:13,520 I then fired up a Windows 10 machine which had been upgraded from Windows 7 256 00:24:13,729 --> 00:24:17,940 (in case you forgot, Microsoft stopped licensing DVD playback with Windows 10 257 00:24:17,940 --> 00:24:24,922 but if you upgraded from 7 they’d transfer the license built into that and let you use this Windows DVD player app. How fun!) 258 00:24:24,922 --> 00:24:27,748 and it… also works just fine. 259 00:24:27,748 --> 00:24:31,631 In fact it’s got a nice and obvious CC button to turn them on. 260 00:24:31,631 --> 00:24:34,144 Genuinely, great job! 261 00:24:34,144 --> 00:24:38,846 But for those who weren’t blessed with that  specific provenance of Windows upgrades, 262 00:24:38,846 --> 00:24:44,639 playing DVDs on a computer in 2025 requires a traffic cone. 263 00:24:44,639 --> 00:24:50,107 And an optical drive… anyway while VLC can see the caption data 264 00:24:50,107 --> 00:24:55,484 (and in fact it lets you select between the four data streams in the EIA-608 standard) 265 00:24:55,484 --> 00:24:59,856 it’s… really quite awful at rendering them. 266 00:24:59,856 --> 00:25:06,610 It’s kind of astonishing, really, the right side keeps going off the  edge of the player and this also happens in full-screen mode. 267 00:25:06,610 --> 00:25:10,924 I’ve also noticed some pretty bad decoding errors in some of the captions 268 00:25:10,924 --> 00:25:15,052 which aren’t present on a real TV decoding them the old-school way - 269 00:25:15,052 --> 00:25:17,646 so it’s not an error on the disc. 270 00:25:17,646 --> 00:25:25,880 I hadn’t updated VLC in probably ever so I did to see if this might have been fixed and, uh, the answer appears to be no. 271 00:25:25,880 --> 00:25:33,613 The captions changed a little bit but they’re still routinely falling off the right edge of the screen and those errors are still there. 272 00:25:33,613 --> 00:25:35,539 This surprised me. 273 00:25:35,539 --> 00:25:45,196 VLC’s kinda crappy work, along with the 3D Blu-ray player and the two DVD players which were manufactured less than 12 months ago 274 00:25:45,196 --> 00:25:50,435 seem to suggest that people simply forgot about those line 21 captions. 275 00:25:50,435 --> 00:25:53,056 So I did a little digging into this. 276 00:25:53,056 --> 00:26:00,258 I merely tolerate computers and aren’t into some of the stuff y’all are like homelabs and plex servers and stuff, 277 00:26:00,258 --> 00:26:07,259 but I figured this might have become a problem  for those who like to back up their DVDs and also use captions. 278 00:26:07,259 --> 00:26:09,731 The answer I’ve found is 279 00:26:10,328 --> 00:26:11,931 [shrugs] 280 00:26:11,931 --> 00:26:16,999 Not a lot of people who are into hoarding media like that seem all that concerned about captions, 281 00:26:16,999 --> 00:26:27,020 and for those who are - what I read suggests that the way DVD handled line 21 captions in the MPEG2 container is more than a bit odd 282 00:26:27,020 --> 00:26:33,760 and requires conversion when moving to a more modern video  format which doesn’t always work that well. 283 00:26:33,760 --> 00:26:41,667 But a lot of what I’ve run across doesn’t make  a clear distinction between DVD subtitles and line-21 closed captions 284 00:26:41,667 --> 00:26:48,273 (which makes sense because it’s a confusing distinction) but it makes research into this rather difficult. 285 00:26:48,273 --> 00:26:55,593 In a modern context, image-based DVD subtitles are actually much weirder and so they’re harder to get working - 286 00:26:55,593 --> 00:27:02,190 and I can’t easily differentiate between what people are talking about as they discuss this stuff on Reddit and junk. 287 00:27:02,190 --> 00:27:06,066 So I don’t really know what’s up and I gave up trying to find out. 288 00:27:06,066 --> 00:27:12,777 The main thing that I’m concerned about, here, is that DVD backups actually contain the caption data. 289 00:27:12,777 --> 00:27:19,667 Disc rot is a known problem so we can’t guarantee that any particular DVD is going to be readable in the future. 290 00:27:19,667 --> 00:27:26,321 If the entire disc ISO is backed up and a bit-perfect copy can be reproduced then that data will be there, 291 00:27:26,321 --> 00:27:35,923 but I really don't know whether the captions are being correctly handled in the various ways people may convert DVD video from MPEG2 into something a little more modern. 292 00:27:35,923 --> 00:27:38,521 But I bet the comments will know! 293 00:27:38,521 --> 00:27:41,749 Now, in some respects, I get it. 294 00:27:41,749 --> 00:27:49,857 DVD subtitles are their own thing, and closed captioning was never really a “function” of a DVD player. 295 00:27:49,857 --> 00:27:56,166 It was just something that happened automatically in the digital to analog conversion process. 296 00:27:56,166 --> 00:28:06,318 But it’s really quite odd to me that so many devices have been sold which cannot process and render those captions for modern displays. 297 00:28:06,318 --> 00:28:08,831 But I do have some good news. 298 00:28:08,831 --> 00:28:11,608 Not everyone forgot. 299 00:28:11,608 --> 00:28:17,637 I have one more Blu-ray player at my disposal, and it’s this 4K Ultra-HD Blu-ray player. 300 00:28:17,637 --> 00:28:24,561 Unlike the 3D Blu-ray player, when you go into the options menu on this one there’s a selection for closed captions. 301 00:28:24,561 --> 00:28:27,140 And holy crap, it works! 302 00:28:27,797 --> 00:28:29,321 Mostly! 303 00:28:29,321 --> 00:28:36,780 It’s rendering them on the bottom left of the screen for some reason which wrecks the positioning that was lovingly encoded into this caption stream, 304 00:28:36,780 --> 00:28:38,605 but at least they're visible! 305 00:28:38,605 --> 00:28:42,034 And you can even change the font and the color if you like. 306 00:28:42,034 --> 00:28:50,414 My hat goes off to whichever engineer at Sony remembered about those captions and made sure this Blu-ray player could display them over HDMI. 307 00:28:50,414 --> 00:28:56,690 There’s a little room for improvement, and it supports software updates so maybe the current version is better, 308 00:28:56,690 --> 00:28:59,463 but I am not connecting this thing to the internet to find out. 309 00:28:59,463 --> 00:29:01,963 For all I know an update will break it. 310 00:29:01,963 --> 00:29:10,154 However, the Playstation 3 provides some more evidence which suggests this is a function that people just keep forgetting about. 311 00:29:10,154 --> 00:29:15,147 Because it renders line 21 captions perfectly. 312 00:29:15,147 --> 00:29:17,992 You have to go into the settings to enable them 313 00:29:17,992 --> 00:29:20,483 (honestly I have no idea why nobody thought 314 00:29:20,483 --> 00:29:28,254 “if there are no subtitles on a disc, make the subtitle option turn on line 21 captions” because it seems to me like that’s a pretty obvious fallback strategy 315 00:29:28,254 --> 00:29:34,079 and much more user friendly than making it an option you’re going to have to turn on and off outside of the player interface) 316 00:29:34,079 --> 00:29:36,367 but at least it works. 317 00:29:36,367 --> 00:29:43,827 I haven’t used this thing in years so whatever version of  the software it’s running is definitely older than the software on the 4k Blu-ray player, 318 00:29:43,827 --> 00:29:51,633 and that’s why I think the institutional awareness of this DVD feature is slowly fading away. 319 00:29:51,633 --> 00:29:55,123 Although, if you change the font option on the PS3, 320 00:29:55,200 --> 00:30:03,040 then it does the same weird rendering on the bottom left that the 4K Blu-ray player does. So it’s still got some bugs. 321 00:30:03,040 --> 00:30:07,921 Now I don’t have a PS4 or PS5 to test how they render captions, 322 00:30:07,921 --> 00:30:17,644 but the Sony website suggests they both have a closed captioning option so I would expect both of them to at least work as well as the PS3 does. 323 00:30:17,644 --> 00:30:23,896 And it looks like Microsoft has implemented this correctly on Xboxes with optical drives, as well. 324 00:30:23,896 --> 00:30:32,624 Since those game consoles probably outsell  every Blu-ray and DVD player model at this point, well, at least it’s not completely dead. 325 00:30:32,624 --> 00:30:42,312 But I still find it incredibly baffling that these new DVD players which have one job — play DVDs — can’t do it. 326 00:30:42,312 --> 00:30:45,165 Unless you use composite, of course. 327 00:30:45,165 --> 00:30:52,381 Oh and, FYI, the PS3 is spitting out  line 21 data through its AV multi-out port when it plays DVDs. 328 00:30:52,381 --> 00:30:56,325 So hook it up that way to your old Trinitron and you’re good to go. 329 00:30:56,325 --> 00:30:58,794 But that’s all for now. 330 00:30:58,794 --> 00:31:02,793 I think accessibility features are very important 331 00:31:02,793 --> 00:31:11,071 and it’s great that we have so many technologies now which help those with disabilities to experience media and even the broader world. 332 00:31:11,071 --> 00:31:14,805 But we can’t just abandon the old ones. 333 00:31:14,805 --> 00:31:23,985 Sure, not all captions are done that well but many of them were done with much more care than any automatic captioning system could ever achieve. 334 00:31:23,985 --> 00:31:30,207 And while I don’t personally use captions  all that often, I think they’re important. 335 00:31:30,207 --> 00:31:37,110 DVD hasn’t run off into the sunset just yet, which makes this  incompatibility problem extremely annoying - 336 00:31:37,110 --> 00:31:49,148 but one day it will be truly obsolete, and I hope that media preservation folks are thinking about how to get those captions (and subtitles!) working in DVD backups. 337 00:31:49,148 --> 00:31:56,571 But I suppose the good news is that the 8.5 gigabytes a dual-layer DVD can store is no longer very huge. 338 00:31:56,571 --> 00:32:02,167 You could backup 1,000 DVDs on a $150 hard drive. 339 00:32:02,167 --> 00:32:03,893 I should probably do that. 340 00:32:03,893 --> 00:32:09,876 Uh, so if nothing else - a little reverse engineering from saved ISOs should do the trick. 341 00:32:09,876 --> 00:32:13,584 For now, though - I like putting the thing in the thing. 342 00:32:13,584 --> 00:32:17,881 Media collections are a lot more fun when you get to interact with them. 343 00:32:18,867 --> 00:32:21,377 ♫ selectably smooth jazz ♫ 344 00:32:22,572 --> 00:32:24,486 Before the bloopers, quick announcement: 345 00:32:24,486 --> 00:32:31,662 I’ll be at Open Sauce again this year which  is happening between July 18 and the 20th in the San Francisco Bay Area. 346 00:32:31,662 --> 00:32:38,640 This is a really cool event that I’ve really enjoyed going to, and if you’d like more information about it there will be a link in the doobly-doo. 347 00:32:39,760 --> 00:32:43,913 So this Blu-ray player  sports analog video outputs, too. 348 00:32:43,913 --> 00:32:46,038 Including ba - ah I didn’t hook it up! 349 00:32:46,486 --> 00:32:48,376 I forgot about that part. 350 00:32:48,376 --> 00:32:52,226 And either their TV or their caption decod - 351 00:32:52,226 --> 00:32:55,394 decoder. Gotta caption decoooder. 352 00:32:55,394 --> 00:32:57,116 Up in North Dakoooder. 353 00:32:57,116 --> 00:33:00,298 Because they still look pretty darn good. 354 00:33:00,298 --> 00:33:02,048 Stupid loud cars! 355 00:33:02,735 --> 00:33:06,015 Uh…. hello? Where’s the… 356 00:33:06,015 --> 00:33:08,280 where’s the bright blue box? 357 00:33:08,280 --> 00:33:12,872 Though they aren’t super readable thanks to its pretty rolululululu augh! 358 00:33:13,380 --> 00:33:16,356 Its pretty row lesorution - I can’t even say that. 359 00:33:16,356 --> 00:33:19,544 Row lesol - lesolution? 360 00:33:19,544 --> 00:33:22,244 Reso, le - lesolution. That’s hard to say. 361 00:33:22,244 --> 00:33:25,526 Notice how the accessibility and captions options in the… 362 00:33:26,482 --> 00:33:28,356 well farts. 363 00:33:30,000 --> 00:33:32,027 CBS Presents: Perry Mason starring Raymond Burr in 364 00:33:32,027 --> 00:33:35,437 Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case of the Forgotten Captions 365 00:33:36,000 --> 00:33:37,763 That's for those Perry Mason fans out there. 366 00:33:37,763 --> 00:33:39,481 I know there are at least a dozen. 367 00:33:39,481 --> 00:33:45,179 Seriously if you're looking for some good old fashioned drama with a side-dish of a hopeful representation of how the justice system is supposed to work... it's refreshing. 368 00:33:45,179 --> 00:33:46,691 If very, very dated.