Thanks to Northern Virginia Resource Center for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Persons (NVRC):

DVD Players That Won't Display Captions

HDMI cables like the one in the photo above are now being widely used for connecting DVD players to digital TVs. These HDMI cables have a tiny flaw; they were not designed to allow captioning signal to pass through them.  Uh oh.  As a result, you will see a beautiful picture but no captions. We know. We hear lots of complaints about this at NVRC. Gadget queen Dana Mulvany first brought the problem to our attention months ago.

Bob MacPherson, our friend and colleague at Better Hearing News, has done some research to find a solution.  He suggests using a DVD recorder with an ATSC tuner (not a DVD player) to play your captioned DVDs.

Bob confirmed with Panasonic tech support that two of their models will work:

  Model DMR-EZ47VK - DVD recorder/VCR combo.

  Model DMR-EZ27K - DVD recoder.

Bob did a price check at Amazon and found the retail to be $276 for the DVDrecorder /VRC combo; $215.06 for the DVD recorder only.

Said Bob, "I suspect that similar models from other makers will also be up to the task."

Bob also found a cheap solution for those people he calls "non-purists" who don't want to break the bank for an expensive DVD recorder.  He tested a widely-available DVD player, the Durabrand Progressive Scan DVD Player, DVD-1002, which you can find at Wal-Mart for just under $30. I saw it on their website.  According to Bob, the Durabrand worked perfectly and displayed closed captioning when used with the basic composite video cable. It also worked perfectly when used with the better component video type cable. 

For anyone confused by those cable terms (mark me one of the guilty), Bob recommends the explanations at http://www.lyberty.com/encyc/articles/svideo.html.  I found the illustrations at that website to be very helpful. I'm now memorizing "yellow, good...green, blue and red, better".

-- Cheryl Heppner

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