Closed Captions

Channels Android TV Feature Requests
#1

I just bought the Channels app for Android TV, I really like it. I was wondering if closed captions support for Live TV is coming in future release?

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Android DVR Support
#2

Yes we definitely plan to support Closed Captions. There are some technical hurdles on Android that are causing it to take longer than we hoped, so it didn’t make it into the v1 release.

#3

Thank you!

#4

Is there an ETA on subtitles? As far as feature parity, this is probably the most important one that is missing. The rest of the DVR features are less important because the awesome web app.

#5

Subtitles? Closed Captions are provided by the video stream itself and that can already be enabled on the app.

#6

Not on android yet, as far as i can tell.

#7

We’ve recently added support in the Android/FireTV app for DVB and teletext subtitles. ATSC closed captioning support is in the works, but will take a while because of complications with the Android hardware video decoding APIs.

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#8

I was going to ask if the closed captioning offered user-selectable text size and colour, and background on/off/colour, but it looks like there is, as yet, no closed captioning support at all? That’d be a show-stopper for me. My hearing is not good, and I need CC for just about every TV show short of news.

Don’t mean to pester you, but any update on this?

#9

No updates yet. We had to disable DVB captions too because the Oreo update broke them.

#10

When would you suggest I check back? Thanks.

#11

I’m looking into this but it’s going to take atleast a month or two of engineering effort to get it working.

#12

Very well. Thanks. I’ll see y’all again in a couple months.

#13

So, to be clear, Closed Captioning is not available for the Fire TV app? I was hoping to get a Prime Day deal on a couple of Fire TV pendants, and switch from our old, but very satisfactory Windows Media Center DVR to Channels DVR. It can’t happen if we have to give up having CC.

#14

Correct, no CC yet

#15

I’m curious if other apps you’re using offer this?

It seems Android TV has some global captioning options under accessibility, where you can set the preferred color style and size. I plan to read these preferences from the system and render our captions accordingly- would that be sufficient?

#16

Those settings provide a lot of flexibility; I think they would be very sufficient.

#17

[quote=“tmm1, post:15, topic:4377”]
I’m curious if other apps you’re using offer this?[/quote]
Not of which I’m aware. You can be a trail blazer :slight_smile:

Not even Amazon’s own app on their own device pays any attention to the caption settings under Accessibility. Weird, eh?

I’d certainly be happy with it.

Thanks for asking :slight_smile:

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#18

Additional request? Please provide a way from within the app to turn CC on/off. That was one thing I always hated about our Roku box: Had to go Home -> Settings -> Captions -> (select what you want) every time you wanted to turn them on/off.

#19

I’ve uploaded a new beta (v112) of Channels to the Play Store, with full support for closed captioning!

To try it out, opt-in to the beta here: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.getchannels.app

Closed Captioning
#20

So the good news - it works! and that’s awesome.

A few observations:

  • You have turn on caption for every video you watch. It doesn’t stay sticky, and it should. Chances are if you’re watching one show with CC, you need/want to watch them all with CC.
  • The positioning of the caption seem a little bit off, at least compared to what I typically see. And lines wrap after a few words to another line for no apparent reason. On one show I was watching (NBC Nightly News) the captions were in the middle of the screen.
  • Black background for the caption instead of making it translucent is not ideal.
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