Closed Captioning in Europe

[Headway]

I have some American dvds featuring cc (so they say) but my dvd players won't even find them in the menu. I've heard that might have something to do with the dvd player inability to do so. My question is:
Are there any dvd players available in Europe which will read the closed captions?
Or is it not that easy?
Thank you

[MOVIEGEEK]

CC is only mandatory in the US(and possibly Canada), it's embedded in line 21 of a NTSC broadcast.
You can't view CC on a PAL TV because only NTSC TV's can decode it.

[usually_quiet]

If your PC has a DVD drive, some software players for PCs will display closed captions. Windows Media Player and VLC can display closed captions. Most versions of Power DVD can do this as well.

I don't know of a stand-alone DVD player that displays them. As MOVIEGEEK said, seeing closed captioning on US DVDs requires a TV equipped with an analog closed caption decoder.

[usually_quiet]

After I wrote my previous post I remembered that I had seen "Closed Caption On/Off" on one of the menus for my parents' Philips DVD player the other night. I downloaded the manual, and sure enough, it can display closed captions. Look at some Philips players and see if the European models have the feature available.

[Headway]

Thank you for your answers, pals.

[Headway]

But.. even if a dvd player had this option of displaying cc, Would I still need a NTSC tv set?

[yoda313]

I think you might be able to extract the closed caption and encode as subtitles. THan you could either do soft subs or hardcode them. However that procedure would have to be done for every disc in question and not on the fly by the player. It would have to processed individually and burned later.

edit - yes you can once you copy the dvd to your computer - a program called vobsub can extract closed caption material from a dvd. From there you can use subtitle workshop to process further. I don't have much experience with subtitles so I can't elaborate much more than that. There are guides on this website for that.

[MOVIEGEEK]

But.. even if a dvd player had this option of displaying cc, Would I still need a NTSC tv set?

Yes, the TV does the enabling and decoding. Subtitles are enabled by the player and overlaid on the video.
I would watch the DVD on a PC if you really want to watch CC, you can also use subtitles and get all the speech.
CC is similar to subtitles but adds sounds such as "[a dog barks]", I noticed Avatar's subtitles were similar to CC.

CC are for deaf people and only come in English.
Subtitles are for the hard of hearing or those who speak different languages.

[Headway]

However, last summer in Irelan, you could get cc for some tv films (maybe only on bbc, I can't remember). Anyway, I'd say they have PAL system as well in the British Islands.

[MOVIEGEEK]

I think they call it Teletext in the UK and yes they use PAL.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_captioning

[netmask56]

Most new TV's sold in Australia (PAL jurisdiction) are PAL/NTSC compatible. When I play a US disc the resolution automatically changes to suit on my Samsung panel. So I guess many European TV sets would be the same? I can't imagine a separate factory run for the tiny Oz market?

[usually_quiet]

Since the Philips DVP3962 DVD Player's manual that I downloaded said little about how the "Closed Caption On/Off" would be used, I tried it earlier this evening. Philips DVD players are not the solution you are looking for.

Unfortunately, turning the DVD players "Closed Caption" setting "On" does not make the DVD player decode and overlay closed captions on the picture as I thought it would. The TV was still responsible for decoding closed captions and overlaying them on the video. Turning it "Off" stopped the closed caption data from being sent as usual when using the player's composite video connection and interlaced output. (Closed caption data is always removed from the signal when using HDMI, or when progressive output is selected.)

Using component video and interlaced output, the "Off" setting would stop both subtitles and closed captions from being displayed at the same time when and a subtitle track is selected and the TV's closed captioning is left on. The "On" setting would be used when all subtitles were off, and closed captions were wanted instead.

Although I hear well, I use closed captions at times. The English subtitles could be more accurate than closed captions and may include descriptions of background sounds. Closed captioning is often imperfect. Frequently some words will be left out, other words will be mis-spelled, or the captioner will misunderstand what was said and type the wrong words. TV is much worse than movies in this respect, but I have found movie closed captioning can have mistakes too.

The only situations I have encountered where viewing closed captions might be preferable for some are when English wasn't the original language but was dubbed for release in North America, or the English subtitles lacked descriptions of background sounds.

[Edit] If somebody really wants to see N. American closed captioning in Europe and doesn't have a compatible TV and DVD player, the easiest way would be to rip the DVD to HDD (to avoid region code conflicts), and then use one of the software players I mentioned.

[Headway]

I can watch American discs allright and I can get subtitles if they are in the menu. But some discs don't include subtitles, that's why I'm interested in getting the cc as an alternative (my English is standard and sometimes I don't understand everything they say).
So far, I see I will have to use my computer if I want to get the cc.
Thank you everybody for your help