If you’re in the USA, the iTunes Store now allows you to easily search for movies with Closed Captions available.
The feature was rolled out earlier this week, and can be accessed using the iTunes Store’s “Power Search”.
You can either go into the Movies section and then select Power Search from the store menu, or select Power Search first and then “Movies” from the pop-up menu. There’s a new checkbox “Search movies that are available with Closed Captioning” under the row of edit text fields, as this screen clip shows:
If you click the checkbox then click the Search button with no other fields filled in, it’ll show you all movies with Closed Captioning available – currently 53 in the USA store.
The checkbox for searching Closed Captions doesn’t appear when searching for TV Shows in the USA store, or at all in any of the other country’s stores as far as I can tell. I hope that once captioned material is available in these other locations that the search function will become active there too.
- Ricky Buchanan
davidn April 22, 2008 at 3:07 am
Well, in most European countries we don’t get any TV shows or movies in iTunes at all, not even without closed captioning
Ricky Buchanan April 22, 2008 at 11:59 am
@Davidn: Neither do we, down here in Australia. It seems to be only the USA, Canada and UK stores which *do* show either TV or Movies actually, from my memory of the ones I checked – and the vast majority of that was only in the USA store.
Herbert Schuchard December 14, 2008 at 10:20 am
I checked out the iTunes movies and only about 100 movies on itunes seemed to have captioning. I know that many more movies on CDs have captioning and hope they too will have captioning on iTunes. I like watching movies with captioning even though I do not have a disability, it just helps to understand what is being said. – Herb
Ricky Buchanan December 14, 2008 at 6:05 pm
@Herbert: I hope iTunes makes close captions available for all captioned movies too – it’s so easy and doesn’t inconvenience those who don’t want captions.
Brendan Gramer May 27, 2009 at 6:13 am
While this is a great start, I tend to agree that there isn’t much captioned content available through iTunes but the burden is actually on the content producers to provide captions within their content. Apple has done everything short of becoming a content producer to help enable captions so it really isn’t their fault.
You have to admit that closed captioned content around the web is getting better though. Look at Hulu which is supposed to come out with an iPhone/iPod Touch app if the rumors are true. YouTube also has captions (click lower right popup) if used but not many people understand how to embed captioned text inside their homemade videos.
There are also the movie theaters that have expanded to show more open captioned and rear window captioned movies. There is also a website search engine called Captionfish that makes it easy to search for captioned movies around you. http://www.captionfish.com
One of my dream wishes is to have an iphone app made by Apple that lets me turn on/off captions in all these devices/softwares that Apple allows captioning in. NOW that’s cool!
Ricky Buchanan May 31, 2009 at 11:12 pm
@Brendan: That’s a great idea about an iPhone app which can switch captions on and off. I wonder if it’s feasible?
Richard April 29, 2010 at 8:02 am
This feature has been a long time coming. Captioning has been so late to the game with online viewing of movies…I am so glad that it has finally arrived!
.-= Richard’s last blog: DVD Movies New Releases =-.