Talk:Closed captioning/Archives/2014

What are Closed Captions?
I had a guess as to what cc-s are, but I wanted to find out. This article is waaaay to long and complicated in getting to a simple statement (definition) of cc. The opening should be simplified and cleaned up. THEN, the article can get into all the technical stuff. The next thing I wanted to know was how some-one can SEE the texts (on t.v.), assuming one has a newer t.v. Maybe the answer is in the article, but I'm none the wiser. Please tell us now, using straight-forward English!


 * Whoever wrote the preceding comment has a good point. If somebody can come up with a good public-domain picture of captions on a television screen, I'll write a new introduction to the article that explains what captions are to the layman before launching into the technical stuff and applications of captioning. Gary D Robson 16:54, 30 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Opening paragraph is confusing. Particularly the last words. I'm still not sure the difference between the terms 'open' and 'closed'.Preroll (talk) 21:05, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

What about languages that don't use the Roman alphabet?
Current closed captioning standards -- for both analog and digital TV in the USA -- are limited to the Roman alphabet. They don't even support cyrillic, let alone Hebrew, Arabic, Devanagari (for Hindi etc.), Chinese, Japanese or Korean. Will this limitation also hold true in the future, or will we see evolution, say toward incorporation of Unicode in closed captioning? LADave (talk) 20:26, 12 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Closed captioning, as distinct from subtitles, only supports the Latin alphabet. As it is only used in the United States, there's little point in adding support for other alphabets. The future is much more likely to give way to general multi-purpose subtitles rather than changing closed captioning.--Prosfilaes (talk) 13:29, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Line 21 Analog captioning supports the Latin alphabet with extended characters to cover not only English but Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Danish, Italian, Finnish and Swedish. Support is also present for non-Latin alphabets, Chinese GB 2312-80, and Korean KSC-5601-1987. I don't see Japanese specifically mentioned, but both the Chinese and the Korean character sets include some Japanese characters (I don't know if it's complete or not). Digital closed captions by default supports the Latin alphabet, but also has provision for 16-bit character sets

That said, I live in Seoul and I've never seen any closed captioning, even in English. Years ago, my colleague advised a government committee which studied whether to require closed captions. But their conclusion was negative. I have no reference for this, but surely a report must exist somewhere, if someone wants it. Rclott (talk) 05:11, 10 January 2013 (UTC)rclott