Caption Max

by our very own Tom Hinckley

About once a month, usually about mid-evening, I get the same call. It usually starts with something like, “How do I turn the [argggg] captions off??!!”

I mention the website FAQ—Yes, they’ve already tried that. That’s why they’re calling. And by this point they’re usually somewhere between mildly agitated and very irritated.

And here’s the thing—They’re right.

In the brave new digital cable/satellite universe, here is what I have to do to turn captions on and off at home:

First, I have to turn off the signal decoder box–That’s right, turn it off, completely.

Except it’s not really off. It’s sort of, I don’t know, sleeping or something. The next step is to hit the settings button on the remote, which gives me an onscreen menu. From there I have to find the closed captioning sub-menu, which has an on/off toggle along with many, many other settings relating to caption size, shape, color, background.

But I don’t care. I just want to turn them on or off and get on with my life.

I have to toggle the setting to on, restart the box, then, often, retune it to the channel I was watching before I decided I wanted to check out the CC. Of course, to turn it off, I have to do all of this in reverse.

I’ve tried walking callers through this process over the phone, but we usually hit a wall at some point. That’s because not all boxes are the same and not all signal providers handle captioning in the same way. Whether it’s an easy fix or not, I usually refer them back to their provider on the theory that if the providers get enough of these calls, they’ll fix the process to make accessing (as well as de-accessing) CC data easier, and the TV world will be a much better place for everybody.