WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 00:00:00.080 --> 00:00:06.597 Did you know that DVDs have two very different  kinds of captioning data stored on them? 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 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). 00:00:22.865 --> 00:00:24.315 Take a look at this. 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. 00:00:31.617 --> 00:00:34.804 Like most Blu-ray players it will also play DVDs, 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. 00:00:41.274 --> 00:00:42.869 Like subtitles. 00:00:42.869 --> 00:00:47.234 And if I press the subtitle button on its remote, they appear. 00:00:47.234 --> 00:00:50.337 In fact I’ve got several choices of subtitles available, 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. 00:00:57.720 --> 00:00:59.153 Yeah, remember those? 00:00:59.153 --> 00:01:01.523 Physical media had perks! 00:01:01.523 --> 00:01:03.766 But now, take a look at this. 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, 00:01:09.745 --> 00:01:12.187 I am an old soul. 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. 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. 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… 00:01:33.730 --> 00:01:35.813 nothing happens. 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. 00:01:44.424 --> 00:01:48.211 Except, and here’s what’s weird about this situation, 00:01:48.211 --> 00:01:52.109 it knows they’re there and is correctly decoding them. 00:01:52.109 --> 00:01:55.498 In fact it’s doing it right now. 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. 00:02:03.806 --> 00:02:07.258 Including basic composite video. 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… 00:02:15.271 --> 00:02:17.099 well there they are. 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 00:02:26.115 --> 00:02:31.756 (a feature, by the way, which is still missing from YouTube’s native captioning tool). 00:02:31.756 --> 00:02:36.799 Really wish they’d spend a little more time making that better and easier to use. 00:02:36.799 --> 00:02:41.129 Anyway, since we can see the  captions on the composite input, 00:02:41.129 --> 00:02:46.799 why does the Blu-ray player behave as if there are no subtitles on these discs? 00:02:46.880 --> 00:02:50.837 Well that’s because there are no subtitles on these discs. 00:02:50.837 --> 00:02:53.544 But there are closed captions. 00:02:53.544 --> 00:02:59.724 And the Blu-ray player is actually handling them exactly as a DVD player should. 00:02:59.724 --> 00:03:04.373 The only problem is it will never show them to us. 00:03:04.373 --> 00:03:07.986 See, these captions? They’re not part of the image. 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 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. 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, 00:03:30.312 --> 00:03:33.828 these captions simply do not work. 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. 00:03:42.396 --> 00:03:44.618 Which leads me to some distressing news: 00:03:44.618 --> 00:03:48.592 next year, the DVD will turn 30. 00:03:49.398 --> 00:03:51.762 Yep. Don’t like it but it’s true. 00:03:51.762 --> 00:03:57.485 And when it first hit the scene in 1996, the world was still very analog. 00:03:57.485 --> 00:04:02.598 Consumer television sets (even really high-end ones) didn’t have digital video inputs, 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. 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. 00:04:15.164 --> 00:04:21.179 But anyway, because of this reality DVD was in many respects a bridge technology. 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. 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. 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. 00:04:51.181 --> 00:04:56.545 If it was there, and the user wanted them, the TV would display the captions. 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 - 00:05:02.920 --> 00:05:08.343 in fact television sets were required to support closed captioning in 1993, 00:05:08.343 --> 00:05:15.565 and caption decoders for over-the-air television broadcasts had been commercially available since 1980. 00:05:15.565 --> 00:05:18.295 How does it work? I’ll happily show you, 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. 00:05:25.912 --> 00:05:28.708 If you’d like to learn more - clicky thing. 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 00:05:37.146 --> 00:05:41.682 in order to produce a whole bunch of glowing horizontal lines. 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. 00:05:50.807 --> 00:05:55.125 Oldfangled television receivers generate their own raster locally, 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. 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. 00:06:16.702 --> 00:06:21.147 We called these periods of zero intensity blanking intervals, 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. 00:06:30.720 --> 00:06:36.184 Now in ye-old days, the image on the screen literally was the video signal, 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 - 00:06:43.849 --> 00:06:46.609 and they would appear as black bars. 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. 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. 00:07:01.489 --> 00:07:06.303 Now, there was never anything in the blanking interval - it’s blank. 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. 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. 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. 00:07:33.731 --> 00:07:35.397 This is what it looks like. 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 00:07:41.490 --> 00:07:45.753 which allows us to see the normally-obscured vertical blanking interval. 00:07:45.753 --> 00:07:49.184 And in the last video line before the image starts, 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. 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 - 00:08:05.975 --> 00:08:09.184 and thus, it’s a binary data stream. 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. 00:08:19.099 --> 00:08:23.377 That’s a mouthful so from now on I’ll be calling it line 21 captions. 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. 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 00:08:41.483 --> 00:08:44.663 and with home video formats like VHS. 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. 00:08:55.919 --> 00:08:59.080 So, where does DVD fit into this? 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. 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. 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 00:09:24.710 --> 00:09:31.110 and either their TV or their caption decoder would just… work whenever captioning was available, 00:09:31.110 --> 00:09:37.748 the DVD standard required DVD players  sold in markets which use the NTSC television standard 00:09:37.748 --> 00:09:44.398 to transmit line 21 caption data in their video output whenever they are playing a disc. 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, 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. 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 00:10:09.549 --> 00:10:14.839 in exactly the same fashion as every other video source it might encounter. 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. 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. 00:10:30.805 --> 00:10:37.555 Side-note: if you insist on being pedantic, subtitles and captions have different definitions and purposes. 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, 00:10:45.343 --> 00:10:51.457 while subtitles should only display spoken  dialogue or translations into other languages. 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. 00:10:58.958 --> 00:11:04.102 They’re both a form of text information which is hidden until the user selects it. 00:11:04.102 --> 00:11:08.533 That’s, by the way, why closed captions are called closed. 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. 00:11:15.753 --> 00:11:20.322 However, there are significant technical differences between the two. 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. 00:11:28.702 --> 00:11:35.994 Line 21 captions technically have four concurrent data streams and support multiple languages, 00:11:35.994 --> 00:11:40.827 but the bandwidth limitation meant in practice there were at most two options. 00:11:40.827 --> 00:11:45.415 So DVD subtitles could handle much, much more information. 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. 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. 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 00:12:06.441 --> 00:12:09.355 and could be used in many different ways. 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. 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 00:12:23.766 --> 00:12:29.576 and you had to navigate through the clunky DVD menus to enable them. 00:12:29.576 --> 00:12:34.003 Designers were having a little too much fun with those in the early days of DVD. 00:12:34.003 --> 00:12:36.520 So if you regularly used captions, 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. 00:12:46.235 --> 00:12:52.377 I suspect that’s the main reason the DVD standard wanted to support line 21 captions. 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, 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. 00:13:05.761 --> 00:13:08.614 Just shove it into the transmitter. 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. 00:13:18.627 --> 00:13:22.533 I’ve gone on to find plenty of other examples among my DVDs - 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 00:13:30.677 --> 00:13:34.485 and they never got converted to a subtitle track. 00:13:34.485 --> 00:13:39.783 In 2025, this presents an interesting accessibility problem. 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. 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. 00:13:54.026 --> 00:14:00.082 But as time has marched on, people aren’t using analog video connections so much. 00:14:00.082 --> 00:14:05.641 And as this Blu-ray disc player shows us, that has led to some oversights. 00:14:05.641 --> 00:14:09.129 See, HDMI doesn’t carry caption data. 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 - 00:14:19.099 --> 00:14:23.599 and yes, I checked, there are no caption options in that submenu. 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. 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! 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 - 00:14:47.306 --> 00:14:48.970 which it is doing! 00:14:48.970 --> 00:14:52.931 So it’s not only aware that there are captions on this disc it's playing, 00:14:52.931 --> 00:14:55.480 it’s actively decoding them. 00:14:55.480 --> 00:14:57.889 But during the design phase nobody thought 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” 00:15:05.927 --> 00:15:10.502 which means the captions on many discs appear to be broken. 00:15:10.502 --> 00:15:14.597 They’re not - as we know, because… there they are. 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, 00:15:22.963 --> 00:15:26.002 well they’re not getting captions from this thing. 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) 00:15:34.488 --> 00:15:37.931 then you’ve not seen how good DVDs can look. 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. 00:15:50.188 --> 00:15:54.158 But in practice the image quality is miles better than that. 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. 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. 00:16:12.094 --> 00:16:17.042 Heck, even the film grain comes through on these Perry Mason DVDs. 00:16:17.042 --> 00:16:21.867 There’s a reason new DVD releases are still happening - it’s a fine format, 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 - 00:16:30.143 --> 00:16:31.946 no internet required!" 00:16:31.946 --> 00:16:34.793 Plus, I have the thing! 00:16:34.793 --> 00:16:40.240 Seasons 6-9 aren’t going to disappear like they did from Paramount +. 00:16:40.240 --> 00:16:42.301 But back to the captions. 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. 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. 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: 00:17:04.027 --> 00:17:09.562 use the HDMI (or component) output for Blu-rays and DVDs with subtitles 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. 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 00:17:22.727 --> 00:17:28.192 since this whole compatibility problem isn’t mentioned anywhere in this thing's user manual, 00:17:28.192 --> 00:17:31.653 but at least it makes some flavor of sense. 00:17:31.653 --> 00:17:35.641 HDMI is a new cable which doesn’t work like the old one. 00:17:35.641 --> 00:17:36.901 Get used to it. 00:17:36.901 --> 00:17:42.271 But, uh, a check of the calendar reveals 2009 was 16 years ago 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. 00:17:50.504 --> 00:17:54.146 Like, for instance, this 3D Blu-ray player. 00:17:54.146 --> 00:17:57.398 It’s like a Blu-ray player, but twice! 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. 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. 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? 00:18:17.896 --> 00:18:19.995 No they did not. 00:18:19.995 --> 00:18:25.044 The subtitle button doesn’t do anything, and the options menu reveals nothing helpful. 00:18:25.044 --> 00:18:26.667 Great job! 00:18:26.667 --> 00:18:30.121 Now, granted, this is a Blu-ray player. 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. 00:18:35.708 --> 00:18:40.982 But, you can still purchase new DVD players in a store. 00:18:40.982 --> 00:18:44.063 And so, for science, I did. 00:18:45.287 --> 00:18:46.738 And I bought two of them. 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. 00:18:53.855 --> 00:18:58.802 And the other is a Sony which was $55. 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. 00:19:07.999 --> 00:19:09.482 Including mine. 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. 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? 00:19:22.826 --> 00:19:24.957 Only one way to find out! 00:19:25.040 --> 00:19:26.695 Starting with the Walmart one, 00:19:26.695 --> 00:19:30.843 this thing’s power cord ends in a USB plug which is amazing. 00:19:30.843 --> 00:19:38.066 Also amazing? It actually has a numerical display on the front to show status and runtime. 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. 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. 00:19:49.129 --> 00:19:53.500 So - does this have a way to display closed captions? 00:19:53.500 --> 00:19:55.130 No. 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 00:20:02.684 --> 00:20:07.677 - to suggest it will ever display those captions on the screen. 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. 00:20:16.777 --> 00:20:22.251 However, if I were to use a composite-to-HDMI adapter, captions would not come through. 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. 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. 00:20:38.347 --> 00:20:42.272 Actually, quick note about composite to HDMI adapters. 00:20:42.272 --> 00:20:47.640 These things are cheap, widely available and they generally work shockingly well. 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, 00:20:55.975 --> 00:21:01.289 yet the video these things put out of their HDMI port is generally great. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 00:21:34.640 --> 00:21:38.026 But now let’s see if the Sony one does any better. 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… 00:21:42.287 --> 00:21:43.587 no. 00:21:43.587 --> 00:21:45.331 Same exact story. 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. 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. 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 00:22:08.485 --> 00:22:13.105 but neither one thought to update that functionality for 2025. 00:22:13.105 --> 00:22:14.885 Great work, folks! 00:22:14.885 --> 00:22:17.230 But then a thought occurred to me: 00:22:17.230 --> 00:22:20.150 is this actually a new problem? 00:22:20.150 --> 00:22:23.359 And it turns out - not really! 00:22:23.359 --> 00:22:27.384 This is a portable DVD player from 2005. 00:22:27.384 --> 00:22:32.282 These were everywhere for a hot minute and, since they have their own built-in displays, 00:22:32.282 --> 00:22:36.686 you would think it should be able to display the captions on these discs. 00:22:36.686 --> 00:22:38.224 But can it? 00:22:38.224 --> 00:22:39.588 Nope! 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) 00:22:46.855 --> 00:22:50.566 but it has no ability to display closed captions. 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 - 00:22:58.045 --> 00:23:01.316 well the TV will decode them just fine. 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, 00:23:10.034 --> 00:23:14.575 but if you want to see them on the device itself you’re out of luck. 00:23:14.575 --> 00:23:17.374 Seems like a pretty big oversight to me! 00:23:17.374 --> 00:23:22.761 But, OK, these things are really just cheap DVD  players with a monitor strapped onto them 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, 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? 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. 00:23:47.632 --> 00:23:51.420 Do they know what to do with the closed captions? 00:23:51.420 --> 00:23:55.027 Well, it turns out that answer is pretty complicated. 00:23:55.027 --> 00:23:57.625 In the past, this worked great. 00:23:57.625 --> 00:24:01.682 I fired up this Windows XP machine and good ol’ Windows Media Player. 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.   00:24:08.960 --> 00:24:13.520 I then fired up a Windows 10 machine which had been upgraded from Windows 7 00:24:13.729 --> 00:24:17.940 (in case you forgot, Microsoft stopped licensing DVD playback with Windows 10 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!) 00:24:24.922 --> 00:24:27.748 and it… also works just fine. 00:24:27.748 --> 00:24:31.631 In fact it’s got a nice and obvious CC button to turn them on. 00:24:31.631 --> 00:24:34.144 Genuinely, great job! 00:24:34.144 --> 00:24:38.846 But for those who weren’t blessed with that  specific provenance of Windows upgrades, 00:24:38.846 --> 00:24:44.639 playing DVDs on a computer in 2025 requires a traffic cone. 00:24:44.639 --> 00:24:50.107 And an optical drive… anyway while VLC can see the caption data 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) 00:24:55.484 --> 00:24:59.856 it’s… really quite awful at rendering them. 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. 00:25:06.610 --> 00:25:10.924 I’ve also noticed some pretty bad decoding errors in some of the captions 00:25:10.924 --> 00:25:15.052 which aren’t present on a real TV decoding them the old-school way - 00:25:15.052 --> 00:25:17.646 so it’s not an error on the disc. 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. 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. 00:25:33.613 --> 00:25:35.539 This surprised me. 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 00:25:45.196 --> 00:25:50.435 seem to suggest that people simply forgot about those line 21 captions. 00:25:50.435 --> 00:25:53.056 So I did a little digging into this. 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, 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. 00:26:07.259 --> 00:26:09.731 The answer I’ve found is 00:26:10.328 --> 00:26:11.931 [shrugs] 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, 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 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. 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 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. 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 - 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. 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. 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. 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. 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, 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. 00:27:35.923 --> 00:27:38.521 But I bet the comments will know! 00:27:38.521 --> 00:27:41.749 Now, in some respects, I get it. 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. 00:27:49.857 --> 00:27:56.166 It was just something that happened automatically in the digital to analog conversion process. 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. 00:28:06.318 --> 00:28:08.831 But I do have some good news. 00:28:08.831 --> 00:28:11.608 Not everyone forgot. 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. 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. 00:28:24.561 --> 00:28:27.140 And holy crap, it works! 00:28:27.797 --> 00:28:29.321 Mostly! 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, 00:28:36.780 --> 00:28:38.605 but at least they're visible! 00:28:38.605 --> 00:28:42.034 And you can even change the font and the color if you like. 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. 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, 00:28:56.690 --> 00:28:59.463 but I am not connecting this thing to the internet to find out. 00:28:59.463 --> 00:29:01.963 For all I know an update will break it. 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. 00:29:10.154 --> 00:29:15.147 Because it renders line 21 captions perfectly. 00:29:15.147 --> 00:29:17.992 You have to go into the settings to enable them 00:29:17.992 --> 00:29:20.483 (honestly I have no idea why nobody thought 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 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) 00:29:34.079 --> 00:29:36.367 but at least it works. 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, 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. 00:29:51.633 --> 00:29:55.123 Although, if you change the font option on the PS3, 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. 00:30:03.040 --> 00:30:07.921 Now I don’t have a PS4 or PS5 to test how they render captions, 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. 00:30:17.644 --> 00:30:23.896 And it looks like Microsoft has implemented this correctly on Xboxes with optical drives, as well. 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. 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. 00:30:42.312 --> 00:30:45.165 Unless you use composite, of course. 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. 00:30:52.381 --> 00:30:56.325 So hook it up that way to your old Trinitron and you’re good to go. 00:30:56.325 --> 00:30:58.794 But that’s all for now. 00:30:58.794 --> 00:31:02.793 I think accessibility features are very important 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. 00:31:11.071 --> 00:31:14.805 But we can’t just abandon the old ones. 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. 00:31:23.985 --> 00:31:30.207 And while I don’t personally use captions  all that often, I think they’re important. 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 - 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. 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. 00:31:56.571 --> 00:32:02.167 You could backup 1,000 DVDs on a $150 hard drive. 00:32:02.167 --> 00:32:03.893 I should probably do that. 00:32:03.893 --> 00:32:09.876 Uh, so if nothing else - a little reverse engineering from saved ISOs should do the trick. 00:32:09.876 --> 00:32:13.584 For now, though - I like putting the thing in the thing. 00:32:13.584 --> 00:32:17.881 Media collections are a lot more fun when you get to interact with them. 00:32:18.867 --> 00:32:21.377 ♫ selectably smooth jazz ♫ 00:32:22.572 --> 00:32:24.486 Before the bloopers, quick announcement: 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. 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. 00:32:39.760 --> 00:32:43.913 So this Blu-ray player  sports analog video outputs, too. 00:32:43.913 --> 00:32:46.038 Including ba - ah I didn’t hook it up! 00:32:46.486 --> 00:32:48.376 I forgot about that part. 00:32:48.376 --> 00:32:52.226 And either their TV or their caption decod - 00:32:52.226 --> 00:32:55.394 decoder. Gotta caption decoooder. 00:32:55.394 --> 00:32:57.116 Up in North Dakoooder. 00:32:57.116 --> 00:33:00.298 Because they still look pretty darn good. 00:33:00.298 --> 00:33:02.048 Stupid loud cars! 00:33:02.735 --> 00:33:06.015 Uh…. hello? Where’s the… 00:33:06.015 --> 00:33:08.280 where’s the bright blue box? 00:33:08.280 --> 00:33:12.872 Though they aren’t super readable thanks to its pretty rolululululu augh! 00:33:13.380 --> 00:33:16.356 Its pretty row lesorution - I can’t even say that. 00:33:16.356 --> 00:33:19.544 Row lesol - lesolution? 00:33:19.544 --> 00:33:22.244 Reso, le - lesolution. That’s hard to say. 00:33:22.244 --> 00:33:25.526 Notice how the accessibility and captions options in the… 00:33:26.482 --> 00:33:28.356 well farts. 00:33:30.000 --> 00:33:32.027 CBS Presents: Perry Mason starring Raymond Burr in 00:33:32.027 --> 00:33:35.437 Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case of the Forgotten Captions 00:33:36.000 --> 00:33:37.763 That's for those Perry Mason fans out there. 00:33:37.763 --> 00:33:39.481 I know there are at least a dozen. 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. 00:33:45.179 --> 00:33:46.691 If very, very dated.