In this vlog entry, I decided bring up the subject of how most of the major film studios caption/subtitle only the movies instead of the whole contents (special features) on the DVDs. I hope it'll spread awareness of how serious this problem is.
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10/22/2006 12:32 PM
Oh yes, I remember how disappointed I was with my new DVD toy 6 years ago or so when I discovered all the fun stuff was NOT captioned.
Sometimes, if you play with the TV's own captioning, you can pull out "hidden" captioning, but most of the time you can't. If any of the commentary was originally aired on tv, chances are good. The commentaries are never captioned though which is annoying.
My resident European friend, when I described this problem to him was agog. He also pointed out that stuff that was fully captioned and subtitled is often stripped of same when exported here. For example, Dr Who episodes. It's completely crazy, why remove something that was already put in there?
10/22/2006 12:36 PM
Dr. Who - Series 1 (Season 1) was fully subtitled including the bonus features on the DVD here.
Just in case you didn't know. I agree, I don't always get that too. Though let's remember that both of us use different TV formats (NTSC in North America and PAL in Europe).
:-/
10/29/2006 1:11 PM
Makes me want to move to Europe. Though what is more distressing is the fact that sometimes the captions do not match the content being said. How do we ensure that the captions are adequately stating the content at hand?
Cheers,
Echo
11/02/2006 2:01 PM
Dear Paul ---
I'm the plaintiff in Boltz vs. Disney Studios, in which we sued Disney, Warner Bros, and Universal/Sony over a year ago on this issue. We essentially won: A settlement became absolutely final last Friday, providing for essentially full captioning of "bonus materials" on all DVDs (not just movies, but ALL content), with some exceptions that aren't, I think significant. (Teletubbies babble and similar things designed for under 5 and some theatrical releases that perfomed very very poorly at the DVD market). It wasn't perfect, but it will result - in about 6 months - in well over 95% of all DVDs (including, I am confident, television shows and nontheatrical releases) having all audio dialogue fully captioned.
If you, or others, want to know more (I hope you do: You are in the "plaintiff class" since we had only 1 person in the entire nation exclude themselves, after notice in National Geographic, People, USA today and other publications), look here:
http://www.hearinglossweb.com/Issues/Access/Captioning/boltz.htm
The official notice can be found here, among other places:
http://www.hearinglossweb.com/Issues/Access/Captioning/boltz.htm
Russ Boltz
11/02/2006 2:50 PM
Russ Boltz, thank you for the response. I appreciate it. It's great to know that somebody is doing something about it.
Hopefully, these demands will be met by the major studios within a few months like you said. That would be great for a movie buff like me.
Thanks Russ for the information.
Have a nice day.
11/06/2006 9:23 AM
Thank you very much for putting your thoughts on the lack of captioning on the special features into your vlog. I also appreciate the captions as an non-signing deaf person. It makes a giant difference to me!
I hate not being able to access the special features on my DVDs, especially on The L Word, and other TV DVD setboxes. Hopefully that will change soon.