Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

> Bonus if it’s delayed by exactly 2 seconds, so that it doesn’t spoil jokes, and I can quickly reference it if I missed something someone said (helping me avoid fixating on the captions.)

This is the exact reason why I vastly prefer playing media on my own media player. I have it set to always delay subtitles by exactly 2 seconds. I even have the font overridden to use a nice geometric sans (Josefin Sans, to be exact); subtitles with bitmap fonts (like they are on DVD and Blu-ray) are disabled outright.

Every time there's a new person watching something with me, they comment on the subtitle delay. It usually starts with a complaint that the subs are off-sync. Never had someone (yet) stick to that complaint though, after this explanation. But, nobody I've met has previously recognised a need for such a delay, either. Until they watch something with me, of course.

Manually turning the volume up and down is literally compressing the dynamic range; that's the goal here.

Yea, unfortunately, my old 5.1 surround system of my bachelor days fails the “wife test.” Currently, to get all the channels the sound mixers give you, you need 6 ugly black boxes with speakers in them spread around your living room and another big black box receiver. And all the speaker wire everywhere. Yuck! Even if you hide the wires in the wall and use ceiling mounted speakers it’s still intrusive and ugly.

I use captions too, even though I can (usually) hear the TV. There are many reasons for this:

- I think it makes it somewhat easier to understand than audio only, for one thing.

- If you do not know what they said, because you have missed it, possibly due to other noise in the room (telephone, other people speaking, etc).

- Sometimes the speech of the movie is difficult due to e.g. you do not understand the accent of their speech, etc.

- If you want to reduce the volume or mute to not bother other people.

- If you do not know how to spell someone's name, or an obscure word. (Unfortunately, sometimes the caption writers do not know, and do it wrong.)

- In some shows, they will mention the name of a piece of music; this can help in case you do not know. (They do not always do this, though.)

However, there are often problems with them. For example, sometimes the caption writers do not know what they are saying, either. The caption writers should try to make an effort to find out what they are saying (and the proper spelling), by whatever means are appropriate, e.g. referring to the script, asking the people there, watching the show twice to make corrections if necessary, etc. (This might not always be possible, e.g. live shows that are broadcast as they are being filmed rather than being edited later, but they should do it when possible.)

I also sometimes see worthless captions, e.g. "male announcer reads words on screen". I think that is worthless, and should be omitted.

(If you can specify "hidden captions", then it may be useful to encode the text which is already part of the picture, as a hidden caption and then allow it to be displayed in a caption scrollback menu if the TV system you are using has such a menu (I do not know of any that do have it, but it is something that I would think would be good to have).)

A good feature of captions is that you can turn on/off, and can customize fonts/opacity on some receivers (I personally prefer translucent captions). (DVD video only allows on/off (and selection by language, sometimes), although it should also be possible to allow adjusting colours/opacity (since DVD subtitles are encoded as pictures using indexed colours), although font changing will not be possible.)

I observed this in The Walking Dead, in the first seasons I could clearly hear the dialogue, but since 4-5 seasons I need subtitles for everything. Zombie noises from 200m away are louder than main characters speaking next to the camera.