>>>How can I be sure (or verify) that a certain video card can or cannot help me see closed captions on my PC when watching a DVD movie/program? That is, when buying a new computer I want to make sure that the video card supports closed captions.
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>>If you're playing media from a DVD, usually closed caption support is a function of the DVD player software e.g. CyberLink PowerDVD. It would be the job of this software to read the captions from the disc and insert them into the video stream that gets fed to the video adapter. I'm not 100% sure but I don't think the video adapter needs any special capabilities in this case.
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>>Things may be different if:
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>>- you're using a TV tuner/video adapter and taking a video feed straight from broadcast or cable
>>- you're working with Blu-Ray - because of the high bandwidth and processing requirements to decode Blu-Ray, some video adapters have hardware specifically designed to assist in this and help offload the CPU, so in that case you might have to check that this hardware acceleration supports closed captioning.
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>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_captioning
>>http://www.alldeaf.com/general-chat/7056-dvd-software-closed-captions-need-help-please.html
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>I do have CyberLink PowerDVD and I set the preferences to display closed captions. But all I see is just two letters or two numbers (all random) on the CC line. The problem could be that the CC on this video is in Spanish and PowerDVD does not interpret something correctly. Or it could be, as discussed in the link you provided, something with the installation of CyberLink PowerDVD. I didn't install the CyberLink PowerDVD, it came preinstalled on my Dell PC. I will try playing a regular English CC DVD to see if this will work. If not, maybe I will reinstall the PowerDVD (although I don't think my notebook came with the PowerDVD installation CD).

Usually Dell is pretty good at supplying media for pre-installed programs, unless they've changed their policies lately to save a couple $$. If you have a "packet" that came with the machine, you could check that.

You could also check the CyberLink site for updates to PowerDVD.