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Since You Asked: Source of closed-captioning problem hard to identify Friday Feb 16, 2018 at 12:01 AM This is a subject that has irked me for a long time, and I've reached the end of my patience. Like every other American should, I have been watching the best television event in a long time, Ken Burns' "The Vietnam War." It includes many interviews and testimony with people who were involved directly. My question for you is: Why are 90 percent of the closed captions in every episode complete gibberish? Who is at fault? PBS, SOPTV, Charter or — unlikely — my television? — Robert, via email Unfortunately, Robert, we haven't been able to narrow down the cause of your closed-captioning problems to one thing. But Brad Fay, director of content for Southern Oregon Public Television, outlined a number of factors that could be at play. "There are any number of reasons why the closed captioning might come out as gibberish," he said. Sometimes problems with closed captioning are happening on SOPTV's end, Fay said. "If we get repeated calls about shows, we know something is wrong. There have been a couple of instances where we found our closed captioning was malfunctioning," he said. But he said he doesn't remember seeing a batch of complaints about the closed captions for "The Vietnam War" series, so that would seem to rule out SOPTV. The problem could be related to your TV, Robert. For a series such as "The Vietnam War," a producer is responsible for hiring a company to create the closed captions and embed them in the program. The closed caption reader in your television is then supposed to display those captions to you as you watch the program. "Some closed captioning doesn't work with some TV closed-captioned readers," Fay said. Older televisions are more likely to have problems reading closed captions. That's because in 2009, television signals switched from analog to digital. "When the digital conversion happened, closed captioning went through a metamorphosis, too," Fay said. "The closed-captioning system became digital, too, instead of analog. They started to embed the closed captioning in the digital TV stream. It's all commingled. It's your TV's job to separate it. Sometimes, older TVs don't get it right." Some people just have the wrong brand of television to get closed captioning to work for certain programs, he said. We thought perhaps you were having particular problems with "The Vietnam War" because it contains so many subtitles with English translations of the interviews with Vietnamese speakers. But Fay said subtitles don't interfere with the functioning of closed captions. "The closed captioning should reflect what the English subtitle says," he said. — Send questions to “Since You Asked,” Mail Tribune Newsroom, P.O. Box 1108, Medford, OR 97501; by fax to 541-776-4376; or by email to [email protected]. We’re sorry, but the volume of questions received prevents us from answering all of them.