Closed Captioning not brought to you by Apple

I have a profound hearing loss (one step above full blown deaf), but use telecoil with my hearing aid to hear small speakers (headsets, phones, etc.) I use CC or subtitles to fill in the (many) gaps in understanding when watching a movie or TV show. I was amazed at the audio quality of the video iPod, but still had some gaps in understanding and would greatly appreciate any CC or subtitle support Apple can give - just bought the first six episodes of Lost/2 before realizing there were no captions. Cool device - can't wait for the upgrade.

Attn: all deaf and hearing impaired people!! I wear Neckloop Telecoil Coupler (Williams Sound)instead of earphone.. Great sound!! Oh yes, movies w/subtitles are great on iPod video.. I copied alot of Seinfeld shows w/subtitles.. Alot of laughs!! No luck with closed caption as yet.. I was told that Apple will update iPod w/cc in near future!!

Here's a good example of captioning in a Flash application - notice that the screen size is about the same as the video iPod. You can turn on or off the caption by clicking on the "cc" button. Go over to Macromedia site at http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/max2005/

I have a hearing problem as well. I can hear, but subtitles (and closed captioning) really help me enjoy a show. I'm all for a coalition to require this on discs and video releases in any format, as long as everyone doesn't get hosed by a stupid and unnecessary cost increase (it costs money to caption/subtitle a show, but not *that* much).

I just want to note: all of the files that I've converted that have subtitles and the Lost shows with translated bits are easily legible on the iPod's screen. Very nice.

As mentioned above, the FCC doesn't require closed captioning capability on anything other than broadcast television. And even in that environment, caption capability is only required on screens of a certain size or larger -- and I am absolutely certain that they wouldn't be required on a 2-1/2" screen!

Radu It wouldn't be difficult to add the CC. The shows already are captioned on TV, so they could just transfer over the captions when they convert it. Or maybe it's not as easy I am making it out to be.

My wife uses closed caption on our TV and movies, since she is hard of hearing. I actually enjoy having CC on. Many times in movies or shows, you cannot hear all the dialog.

I think closed captioning on an iPod video is easier said that done... the iPod would have to take the embedded signal and convert it to overlaid text (with a drop shadow) and that simply is not in the circuitry as designed. It is most commonly available in the vertical interval, a bit of visual code dancing around at the bottom of an NTSC frame (you can see it on some sets). As this is being converted to whatever quicktime, it is lost. For example. Consider this.... most DVD subtitles you see, are NOT created this way-- they are actual visual files included along with the other files on the DVD, rather than plain text, or encoding of same, that can drive any font creation engine to overlay them on your picture. Also if parsing Closed Captioning to text was that simple a matter, we would be seeing more of it transcribed directly to the web. (Googles Video search is not quite there, at least at providing full transcripts) I would love to have an app that would strip the captioning off of a TV signal- apparently it is not that common outside the dedicated chips in NTSC TV sets that decode closed captioning. Asking an iPod to provide closed captioning is a bit like all of these people thinking they are going to create an HD DVR from a mac mini. The mini simply can't handle it. I doubt the iPod, as is, could handle converting closed captioning info as it exists, even if it did make it in to the file as viewed.

You know, Steve Jobs has hearing problems (that's why the iPod is one of the loudest players out there), I read that in a story about the development of the iPod, I can't recall where. I also read that the iPod prototypes came separated by component in many shoeboxes in order to keep it secret, so the tester had to assemble it before he could use it. Anyways, if the shows on the iTMS had CC, they'd probably be more expensive because of the extra work needed to make all the subtitles, and they'd proably won't be the day after, at least the subtitled versions. Although, it could be done like some movies in Windows Media where you can go to this website and search for the subtitles you want and then just add them to the movie, but instead of having to look for it on the internet, just provide it with the movie. It'd still be generated text, so I figure the look of it could be configured too. I just found the QuickTime way (http://www.apple.com/quicktime/tutorials/texttracks.html), so it could totally be done. Totally.