No Closed Captions away from home

Is there a trick to get the closed captions working when running the Channels app away from home on a Fire Stick? I already have the accessibility setting set for captions and on other apps the captions work but not on Channels. Doe it not work from away from home?

It only works at bitrates higher than 4mbps

Darn...where I'm at there is a lousy internet connection which seems to be able to only run at 2mbs without a lot of pausing.

Why 4mbps? Are closed captions bandwidth hogs?

Depends on the type of captions I guess. Maybe we can enable it for 2mbps

How would I go about enabling captions at 2mbps? I assume it must be something to change on my server.

It is something we would need to change in the code. Can you try switching to 4mbps first and see if captions appear? Just to make sure its not some other problem.

On the DVR web UI for transcoder does it say hardware or software? If you hover on Transcoder does it say h264_mf or something else?

I will not be at the location until this evening. I spend every evening with my 96 yr old mother and she won't watch without captions.

I will check it out this evening and let you know.

It is set to hardware and hovering displays h264_mf.

Thanks. Try changing that to Software later too and see if that fixes it. It may be that the hardware encoder is what's not supporting captions. I think I was mistaken about the 4mbps threshold (that's for surround sound).

Okay will do. I will let you know later.

Thanks for the quick response too.

I tested it out with the web interface. The hardware decoder does not display closed captions on any resolution or bit rate. The software decoder works for closed captions on all resolutions and bit rates. I am assuming this will be the same on the app when I test it out tonight.

Thanks for the help.

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See:

With the Transcoder set to hardware, CCs now work with Away From Home and web playback.

Thank You,

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