Buying a DVD player with closed captioning.

They're all supposed to.

You need to set it up, though, it doesn't happen automatically. If the other one didn't -- if it was impossible to set it up to display captions -- then I think it's likely that it was just defective.

Can be a bit tricky I guess. There are two ways (3 actually but I'll get to that in a sec) to do Closed Captioning.

All TVs sold in the U.S. are required to have Closed Caption decoding services built into them. A DVD player can send the closed captioning to the TV and let the TV decode it through a process called "passing Line 21". If your DVD player uses this method you need to turn on the CC option in your TV's setup menu - not on the DVD player.

The DVD disc you are playing can also have a menu setup item to display it's own closed captioning. If you use that feature then the DVD creates the captions and sends it as a part of the image data to the TV for display. This is entirely seperate from the TV's decoder.

The 3rd item - Not all DVD players will call closed captioning "closed captioning". "Closed captioning" is a term that is pretty much only used in North America. In the rest of the world (like where the DVD players are built!) they call it either "Secondary Audio" or "Subtitles" so you may see those as configuration options instead of "Closed Captions" in your DVD setup menu. They are the same thing though. They may also hide it as one of the choices in your language menu. Check your DVD player's setup menu for a language choice of "English for the hearing impaired" or "SDH" ("Subtitled for the Deaf and Hard of hearing").

Very thorough explanation, fishin, thanks! (I was about to leave when I wrote my first response and when I was driving realized it wasn't very clear -- came back to clear things up but fishin already hit all of the important points.)

The only thing I'd add is that it doesn't always have anything to do with hearing at all -- sometimes the option is just "English." This is usually found under "set-up" or "languages" on a specific DVD's menu. (As in, you don't do anything to the DVD player per se, just make selections on the menu provided by the DVD you want to play.)

Thanks for the replies.

The DVD player was a cheap model bought at Walmart. I tried my best to set up the CC but to no avail, and there was nothing in the literature explaining that it had CC. I tried using the subtitles, but nothing. It's all moot now for this particular DVD player as it has stopped working after about 40 hours of play. This model was manufactured in Sept. 2007 so, if you're right it should have had CC. However, I've gone on Google and some people say that not all DVD players have CC.

I guess I'll just ask the sales clerk, and if he assures me that the player has CC, then that's a sort of guarantee.

It does sound to me like this was just a faulty model. By all means, talk to a salesperson about whether the model you're thinking of buying has a captioning option, and have them display it for you before you buy it.

If you have a hard time setting it up after that -- if you buy one that the salesperson said has captions and that did display captions in the store -- let us know and I'll try to help you out. (I'm deaf and so use captions all the time, and in many situations -- friends and relatives' houses, hotels, etc.)

I went to Best Buy to get a DVD player and asked the salesgirl if the Phillips player I picked out would transmit CC. She looked at me with a blank stare, but another, more knowledgeable clerk had overheard my question and assured me that Phillips players do have CC.

Voila! I got it home, and it works fine and transmits CC.

Thanks, everybody, for the help.

subtitles and closed captioning are not the same thing. they are worlds different. i wrote an article on this explaining the difference. Edit (Moderator): Link removed
bottom line is CC is for the DEAF; they display every audio sound. subtitles is for people who are learning English; they only display spoken words.

that is true, not all DVD players have the CC decoder chip built in them. Many DVD players get away with only having subtitles built in them. The same goes for the new Windows Media player on the computer. The old version had CC now the new version only has subtitles.
My DVD mintek player was awesome, but it recently broke. Now I'm searching and searching for a DVD player that has CC built into it.