Closed Captions

Channels Android TV Feature Requests
#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:

1 Like
#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.
2 Likes
#21

You can change the caption settings under Accessibilty > Captions. If you set them to On and change to a custom style with background opacity it should work as you expect.

1 Like
#22

You can set the background however you want in the Android global CC settings. I don’t really need CC but sometimes it’s nice to have them, so I prefer to have the background totally transparent.

Kudos to the developers! This is really good.

1 Like
#23

I’m going to make some changes so the default font/background matches the Apple TV app if you don’t have custom settings enabled under Accessibility.

1 Like
#24

[quote=“avdp, post:20, topic:4377”]
So the good news - it works! and that’s awesome.[/quote]
Indeed!

I agree it should be sticky, but more because that’s what would be expected. (POLA: Principle Of Least Astonishment.)

We turn on CC for shows and movies that have a lot of “background noise” (music, etc.), because that’s when dialogue get difficult for us. (For me it’s a hearing issue. For my wife it’s more in the way she hears. Background music, in particular, “distracts” her hearing.) But things like news, shows in PBS’ Create channel, that have little-to-no interfering background noise: We turn CC off because it’s not badly needed and because CC is often out-of-sync with the spoken dialogue, so it can be more distracting than helpful.

That being said: The configurability of CC under Android TV and Amazon Fire TV allows us to obtain captions that we can pay attention to when we want and pretty much ignore when we don’t. This is just terrific!

Kudos to tmm1 for the effort!

1 Like
#25

One issue - not sure if it’s an Android issue or a Channels issue -

In Android under Accessibility > Caption, if you disable the background, then Channels shows a black background. If you enable the background but set translucent to 25%, then it is displayed accordingly. And since 25% is min value for translucency in setting, there does not want to not have a background in channels.

So bottom line: why is there a background on the captions is channels when background is disabled in Android settings?

#26

I thought I had tested that option and it worked. What device and version of Android TV?

#27

On my (new) NVidia Shield, I have background disabled and window disabled, and there is no background on the captions.

#28

NVidia Shield on latest firmware (android tv 8.0.0), Channel Beta 112,

#29

I’ve uploaded a new beta (v114) with a bunch of closed captioning bug fixes:

  • the setting in the app is sticky now
  • default style uses semi-transparent background and monospace font
  • certain special characters like music signs weren’t working
  • font selection on firetv wasn’t working
  • some crashes when leaving the player with CC enabled
  • background settings weren’t working in some cases
#30

Also exiting the current channel when turning CC on/off via CMENU is fixed :slight_smile:

Good work & thanks!

#31

Confirming: Settings -> Accessibility -> Captions -> Custom -> Show Background set to disabled/off, correct?

Works properly on my Xiaomi MiBox 3 running Android 8.0.0, Android security patch level May 5, 2018, kernel version 4.9.54, dated Tue, July 10.

#32

Everything works as expected now! The background is gone when disabled, and the in-app setting for caption is indeed sticky. Perfect!

3 Likes
#33

On FireTV 4k there is no settings -> accessibility option. For FireTV is there no way to do custom CC?