Closed Captioning look and feel on AppleTV and iTunes

Deafmac.org posted a question on what people thought of iTunes Closed Captioning. I don't think a of people knows what it does look like but would like to see. Instead of trying to describe it in words I decided to post pictures and show that AppleTV's closed caption is a bit different from what we are used to. So first off, iTunes does support Closed Captioning as well as QuickTime, kudos to Apple for taking that step for the rest of us. Even beyond that, iTunes Movie Store has a small list of Closed Captioned movies. There is an easy way to find them all, in the Movie section of iTunes Store you'll see "Power Search" in the right column under the "Quick Links Section". Click on "Power Search" and you'll see a check box that says "Search for movies that contain closed captioning". Simply check the box and press the "Search" button. You'll see the list of all movies that are available with CC. Anyway, I bought Stardust so I'll use a snapshot of a scene from Stardust to display what CC looks like:

iTunes Movie window with CC looks like this:



As you can see it looks exactly like the CC we see on a TV! Now, my previous post was about the AppleTV, I actually did have a lot of friends ask about CC abilities on AppleTV and how it looked, below is a quick snapshot of the Closed Caption from my wife's iPhone - keep in mind that this is NOT the actual quality you get from AppleTV, this is just what happens when you take a picture of a TV with a slow camera. But you'll get the point with this image:



So you can see that the CC looks a little different, kinda stylized with shiny edges. At first I didn't like it because it was different and gave me a different feel, but after watching this movie I got used to it and didn't mind too much. So thats it folks, What do you think of the new CC style? I'm curious whether the new look of CC is acceptable or not for you. Personally, I prefer the standard style but I would like to have the option to fade the black background like some TV offers.

Oh and one last thing, Closed Captioning on iPhone looks just like the iTunes snapshot in case anyone was wondering.

BTW, Apple is open to suggestions on this so send them a note if you want to change the look. I think I will too.

UPDATE: 1/2/09 - I feel really stupid now. In the Settings of AppleTV I discovered that there are two modes you can set for subtitles "Standard" and "Enhanced" the Closed Captioning above for AppleTV was set to "Enhanced" by default. When changing to "Standard" the captioning style is just like the image shown in iTunes what we are all used to, very nice.

Lance