It’s been a long slog, but our usual deaf barriers for watching internet video are crumbling. Hulu.com today added a filter to its search engine to return only closed-captioned videos. I’ve been catching up on new episodes of The Simpsons for weeks now, and their captioning is wonderful.
If you have not been using Hulu, you are missing out, my friend. There are dozens of television series up there ready for you to just click’n'watch. It’s all high-quality and legal. The commercials are just 15 seconds each, and appear during the show’s natural commercial breaks for on-air television.
When you go to Hulu.com and click on either “Recently Added” or “Most Popular” in the top navigation bar, you can see a link for “Closed Captioning” at the very bottom of the list on the left side. Click on that and you’ll get only media that’s captioned. You can click on the other categories to narrow down your search to a specific category of closed-captioned video.
For example, I clicked on “Highest Rated,” “Science Fiction,” and “Closed Captioning” and boom, I learn that all episodes of Firefly are on Hulu, free and completely captioned. Oh boy!
Their selection of captioned media keeps growing, which is great news for all of those deaf and hard-of-hearing cubicle workers out there. It is also great for me because it gives my Netflix queue more breathing room (no more Simpsons or Firefly DVDs).
If things keep going in this direction, I won’t need to watch live TV anymore. I pretty much now limit my cable watching to just On-Demand HBO and AMC for True Blood and Mad Men respectively, and my Netflix DVDs are all about Battlestar Galactica. I catch up on Grey’s Anatomy via abc.com (which also provides closed captioning but not as well-implemented as Hulu’s). I have more than 30 full-length movies waiting on my computer that I’ve ripped from my friends’ DVDs, all open-captioned via HandBrake’s burn-in subtitle feature.
And heck, if I’m ever stuck watching live TV for any reason, at least there’s always an episode of Law & Order on some channel, so I’m all set.
Gee, it’s a good thing I’ve got graduate studies to prevent me from becoming a total desk chair potato.
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Isn’t it great when a company listens, makes promises, and then makes good on it’s word?
http://billcreswell.wordpress......s-on-hulu/
Hulu is AWESOME and their customer service has been nothing but spectacular. I recently discovered that “Bones” is captioned-woo hoo! I caught up on all the old episodes but was disappointed to find that not all old episodes have been uploaded. Oh well. Hopefully more TV shows will be captioned and I will be addicted to TV again (no cable here)! =P
Hi Keri! I’m also addicted to Bones and now have resorted to Netflix to request Season 2 and the missing episodes of Season 3. Har. ;-)
Also, as a note to others:
If you create an account with Hulu (free), you can request that the captions load automatically on the videos, instead of having to click the CC button each time a video loads. :)
[…] the guy from DeafDC likes FireFly […]
Thanks for the great tip! Espec. didn’t know that about abc.com. Will check them out.
Adam–thanks for the tip! I had read about Hulu in MacLife, I think…forgot about it and was reminded of it from your blog. Now am watching an episode of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares :)
Yea! Battlestar Galactica rocks!
Thanks, that’s great news! Honestly I’ve been dismayed by how little of the online video content is captioned, especially the tv and movies that are captioned elsewhere, and also how inaccessible the internet as a whole is becoming as more and more content is video along with or replacing text. After all those years of increasing captioned content on television, this feels like a backslide now that everyone I know is watching tv online or on the ipod! So this is good to see…
Question: are itunes shows that you can download and watch on the ipod captioned/subtitled yet?
What about this link:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/4819.....ec-10-2008
It looks like it’s not captioned..
Yeah, not all online content is captioned. If you’ll note, Comedy Central doesn’t provide the Daily Show with captions, either.
Here’s the rub with online captions - the way they’re formatted for television (analog) is different than how they have to be streamed in for HDTV (digital), and online streaming videos have to be set up differently as well. The text file source format isn’t always adaptable for online showcasing. That’s the big reason that so little of the online content from TV is captioned.
So, in order for these shows to be captioned (e.g., Bones, House, 30 Rock, etc.), the text files have to be converted AND re-timed to align with the shorter video length. Online commercials rarely take longer than 30 seconds, versus as long as 2-3 minutes for television commercials.
I’m hoping that with the switch to digital TV and HDTV captioning becoming required, it’ll be easier to convert from one digital format to another, and that more online content can be captioned.
There are software programs that convert analog captions to streaming formats ( example: Caption Keeper - http://ncam.wgbh.org/webaccess.....dex.htmlby NCAM, who brings you MoPix and many movie captions).
While it can be difficult, it comes down to thinking about the issue, caring about the issue, spending money and time on the issue.
Hulu, of all the major online content providers, seems to be sincerely making the effort.
(I wonder too, if the reason that those two shows don’t have it, may be related to the fact that they use real-time captioning? They are somewhat unscripted shows.)
Elgato’s EyeTV can record TV shows to a Mac. You can also export to quicktime. The reason I bought EyeTV is it also records the closed captions, and displays them. Using EyeTV to export to Quicktime, or Elgato’s Turbo for Quicktime export, the captions are included in the Quicktime file. So you can watch shows you record on iPod touch, iPhone and iPod Classic with the Captions setting turned on, and see the captions as they were broadcast.
Unfortunately, the iTunes store has very few movies (only 84 in Canada) that have closed captions, and I haven’t found any TV shows that have captions.
But at least with EyeTV you can record shows, and take them with you, including the closed captions, unlike iTunes.