Spelling It Out

I am reasonably comfortable and conversant with technology, but part of that comes from making efforts to keep things as simple as possible. I've been using Apple computers for over 20 years, while my limited knowledge of how to do certain things in Windows has faded away. I've had TiVo DVRs for about eight years now, and part of the reason I stick with them is because they are so simple to use. (One time when I was visiting my mother she asked me a question about how to do something on her DVR; 45 minutes later I hadn't been able to figure it out, and never did.)

In the final half-season of Breaking Bad currently airing, there has been a lot of whispering. We had to turn up the volume really loud in several scenes, and then of course when the music comes up it blasts us out of our seats (plus our living room is directly under our upstairs neighbor's bedroom, and we try to be considerate about such things). At one point we were forced to turn off the air conditioner in order to hear the whispered dialogue.

So the Mrs. asked me if I knew how to turn on the closed-captioning. I thought I did, but couldn't find anything obvious on the remote. A couple of days later she started working her way through all the TiVo's on-screen menus; I was busy in the next room, but some time later she let out a yell of delight. She had figured out how to activate the CC function. It seems to have been there in the on-screen program info display all along, and we just hadn't ever noticed it.

I was under the impression that we could use it only while watching shows live, but it turned out that the CC data is embedded in the program recordings and can be viewed during later playback. The quality of the transcriptions seems to vary from show to show and even from episode to episode of the same show, but it's there.

As a bonus, being able to access the closed captioning makes it easier for us to enjoy British crime dramas like Luther and Broadchurch, which have a variety of accents with varying degrees of aural decipherability.