I have a 3 month old Apex CRX9200 DVD Recorder. For DVD (rented) movies, the "subtitle" button turns on the subs under the movie just fine. When recording from TV, sometimes I get closed captions (not the subtitles as on DVD movies) sometimes I don't. I have 1 coax cable from Wideopenwest into my house. On that are 2 vcrs, the Apex and a computer modem. No set top boxes.
Here's what I get:
Network Channel Captions?
CBS............6..............yes
NBC............4..............no
FOX.............2..............no
A&E.............46............yes
ABC.............7..............yes
When I sumultaneously record any of the above to a vcr, all have captions. I am not positive, but I think all of the above had captions when I first got the machine.

I called Apex and got through to a real person right away. He explained that my cable company broadcasts some channels in digital and some in analog therefore there are different conversions taking place.

My plan was to eventually replace all my (3) vcrs with (hopefully only two) dvd/hard disk recorders. However, if I can't get captions reliably, my plan is no good. Could I get an expensive DVD/hard disk recorder DVD-RW compatible that WOULD record all captions? What other options would there be?

Cumbersome options like two set top boxes, piping through a vcr to the dvd recorder and recording to my computer are out.