Fix for VIZIO won't show captions... sometimes
Hi, I have a 42 inch Vizio TV hooked up to a Sony Bravia theater system. I had the same problem with some DVDs. One in particular was The Librarian: Return to King Solomon's Mines. I could view it on an older TV (still an LCD) and an OLDER DVD and the captions would show. But on the big Vizio... no go. One of my sons does networking for a living and is very high tech and after some studying of the situation came up with a not so easy fix. First, HMDI cords don't like TV type Captions. That is what this particular Librarian movie had. The other Librarian movies had captions that worked fine because they are accessed by way of the main movie menu. The Solomon movie was NOT that way. It just had Spanish on the menu but the outside of the box said it was CC. Here's the fix:
1. Connect the DVD to the TV with BOTH an HDMI cable (for most movies) and the three wire, three color cable used on older sets (I forget the name of the cable). These cables have three wires. A yellow wire for the image (usually fatter like me)... BE SURE to connect that one to both the DVD and TV's AV inputs. And then a red and a white wire for the sound. If you use the sound from the TV as opposed to a theater system like I have you'll need to connect those. Make these connections from the DVD player to any of the "AV" connections on the back of the Vizio TV. I leave the audio unhooked because I use the Theater System for the sound but either way works... I tried it.
2. Now put the DVD into the player. After it loads set the output on the DVD player, there should be a button on the controller to adjust this. Most DVDs will autoload at 1080 dpi or higher but that won't work. Reset this to 780 X whatever the other setting is (I forget... maybe 420)... the lowest setting the DVD will accomodate.
3. Turn on the TV and go to the menu on the controller. Mine has buttons for AV, TV,HDMI, etc. input. Push AV and then scroll through the AV connections until you find the one that displays the movie. Now when you go to the Menu and scrool down to "Set Up" you should be able to find a line in the set up menu for Captions. Set it to "CC1". If the DVD is playing you should soon see the captions after a few seconds or a minute. These are NOT the usual SDH type but rather straight TV captions but better than nothing.
4. The movie will be letter boxed and smaller than the screen size. In most cases that I've tried, part of the problem is that the set looks for DVD type settings on the movie but sometimes the movie/DVD is really produced in TV settings. That's cool because by going back to the menu yet again you can set the image to one of the "zoom" settings and in many cases it will fill the entire screen better than most movies.
5. If this doesn't work... you may Email me for clarification at:
bill@wclathan.com
I am Bill and I have a serious hearing loss due to 20 plus years of Minnier's Syndrome. I have some sign language ability but just enough to look like a jerk to those who really know ASL. I have an 80% loss on my left side and an 85% (maybe more because I just had a series of attacks and now my aid won't keep up) on the right side. The right side might improve with time as the irritation/over pressure or whatever goes away and allows some healing but I'll surely become more and more deaf as time goes by... When watching TV I am about 90% dependent on the captions. In normal conversation I have about a 40% comprehension so with the TV with strange voices, background music and sound effects... it is much lower and I really need the captions to figure out what's going on. In fact, sometimes I end up having to stop the movie and going back to catch captions I missed. So... this was, like it is to you, a serious problem and for my model of Vizio this works in all cases... so far. The only problem is to remember that NEXT TIME you watch a movie to go back and reset the output on the DVD player and then push the button for HDMI input with the controller
Have a good one, Bill
