Megalion

I'd mourned the fact that Anchor Bay was the one to release these because they are notoriously bad at captioning their releases.

However the other day in the store, I longingly fingered the new 5th season set and on a desperate strand of hope, scanned the backside and was shocked to find the CC symbol that indicates closed captioning.

However, looking on Amazon, it indicates that the set is not captioned. Amazon's records are usually pretty accurate so I use them to check most of the time. I even checked Anchor Bay's site which I haven't done in a long time but I know I've seen in the past that they will mark which releases are captioned. Again no indication.

So my request is this. Would someone who has all of the xena season sets on dvd, or at least Season 4 and 5, Please pop in a random disc from each season and play a bit of an episode and see for yourself if captions come up. I don't trust box markings because I've been burned before.

For reasons I won't go into, circumstances forced me to stop watching Xena halfway through Season 4 and even after I could again, I was determined to watch all of it in order and not spoil myself by watching stuff out of order. So if at least Seaon 4 & 5 are captioned I will be mollified and happy to run out and buy and enjoy now. I can wait for AB to get around to captioning the first 3 later.

THANKS THANKS THANKS in advance!

I'd also appreciate an answer soon as I'd like to use the DDD 20% sale to get the sets if they are captioned.

Mike Lowrey

I've got all the seasons of Xena and Hercules (except S5 of Xena, don't have that one yet) and it looks like S3 onward of both series have the CC symbol, but within the episode selections, there is no way to change the audio/captions. The only thing I can think of is that they may be present in some of the extra special features. In fact, when playing a disc on my computer, the audio/caption right-click menu selection is greyed-out (in-active).

Sorry. I assume you have hearing loss?

Megalion

thanks for replying... captions aren't the same thing as subtitles. You have to temporarily enable captions on your tv to see them. Would you mind checking this for me?

Megalion

Mike, you there? I really need someone to enable captions and check the discs before I buy them cause I'd hate to hassle with DDD about returning opened dvds.

Heartagram

Mega, I checked my copies of Hercules, and to my dissapointment couldnt get captions to work. Not sure if Xena would have the same trouble.

Megalion

damn damn damn

*goes off to cry*

Mike Lowrey

Yeah I know. But doesn't your TV do the captioning automatically no matter if there's actually CC on the source or not? Well, that's not entirely true. They won't do it for all TV sources, but won't they do it for DVDs and even VHS? Or am I getting this all wrong?

As you can tell, I don't do much with captions except for when I want the lyrics to a song (from a DVD source). The VOY-S2 set had a music video of Tim Russ (Lt. Tuvok) singing his song, Kushangaza. I clicked on captions to get the lyrics.

Megalion

No, closed captions are encrypted signals in the video that when decrypted displays as white block text on black background.

Subtitles (which are often called captions by well meaning studios) are what you turn on via a dvd menu.

All tvs made after 1992 should have been made with a caption decoder built in but it has to be turned on via the tv's menu settings. A lot of times there's a CC button on the remote that is a shortcut to this function. If you have more settings then just ON/OFF, what you need is CC1 (as opposed to CC2 or TEXT1 or etc).

What I was asking is if you would enable captions on your tv temporarily and check an episode on a disc from each season that bears the CC mark on the outside cover. I would REALLY REALLY appreciate this because I've been longing to see the rest of the Xena show but haven't been able to bring myself to buy VHS.

Megalion

Oh you mentioned Tuvok's lyrics... that was a Paramount set and they started a long time ago with providing captions and/or subtitles for their extras. I believe Double Jeopardy and Payback are both this way and they were released 3-4 years ago.

Universal sometimes did it but it was really spotty... ie the long documentary for 12 Monkeys was subtitled and I thoroughly enjoyed watching it. The Time Machine remake was also subtitled.

Fox has done it sometimes but again they haven't been consistent that I've seen. ID4 2disc had captioned extras.

Megalion

Still earnestly waiting for someone to do a real test on the discs for captions.... only one day left on the DDD 20% off sale.... make a deaf girl happy please?

Megalion

I still could really use an answer to this??

Jlbkwrm

It took some doing, but I finally convinced one of my DVD players to pass along close captioning signals, and this is what I found:

Season 3 and on all feature the closed caption marking on the package. S3 just has it on the back, while 4+ have it on the spine.
The Anchor Bay releases of seasons 3 and 4 are Closed Captioned for the shows. A quick scan of some of the interviews would indicate that the special features aren't captioned, just the main program.

For seasons 5 and 6, I have the direct-sales version (ordered during the $39.99 sale), not the Anchor Bay versions. They appear to be identical in content, but I cannot give a 100% guarantee. These are captioned in the same manner as seasons 3 and 4--show yes, extras, no.

For the heck of it, I went back and checked the first two seasons--no captions on these at all.

Megalion

THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!!!!!!

I can't tell you how relieved/happy I am to finally have an answer!!!

Of course it sucks that S1 & S2 aren't captioned but I'm familiar enough with them already. Long story but as I said above... I was really hoping that at *LEAST* season 4 and on would be captioned.

I really admire you for going so far as to check the extras *HUGS*

Hopefully the David Panzer group will have another $40/set sale soon. Tempted to get S1 & S2 now in VHS since they're being sold for $20 (probably til they run out of stock)

DVDFreaker

I'm deaf also but it's ridicious that Xena Seasons 1 and 2 doesn't have captions, mind you, I'm not a fan of the show but if Xena Seasons 3 and 4 have captions, why not Seasons 1 and 2? Pretty dumb!

Megalion

My take is that when Anchor Bay or whoever it was responsible for putting the dvds together was first working on bringing it to DVD... they decided to skimp on the captioning to save a few bucks.

Enough complaints or a guilty conscience, who knows... but they finally got their act together and started putting the captions back in.

Question is if they'll go back and add captions to the first two seasons before anymore pressings are done. I would imagine that pressings aren't done very often...

I know that studios have and will do this IN REVERSE!!! When I recently tried to get a replacement copy of Daylight which had suffered disc rot or something... I was shocked to find that Universal & Dreamworks had DROPPED subtitling from their discs. Peacemaker and The River Wild were two other movies I got along with Daylight in the DDD 20% off sale and dammit it if they weren't all lacking in subtitles.

But back to the topic at hand... it was at least a move in the RIGHT direction and actually I was told that Anchor Bay is just the distributor... it was someone else that was in charge of putting the dvds together... perhaps that David __?__ group that's behind all the Herc & Xena merchandising (including the VHS sets as well). xenacatalog.com is just one of the many urls they have for their site.