Why are some home videos labeled as being captioned, but there are no captions on the movie?
If there are no captions on a video, the master tape used to make the copies may not have had captions. The studios make thousands of copies at different facilities, and maybe one of the facilities did not use a captioned master tape. It’s also possible that the captions may have been accidentally stripped off due to a technical problem in reproducing the tape. Equipment problems and poor quality equipment can produce errors in the captions as they are being displayed. The caption decoder chip in some equipment has very little room for error, so if the timing is off a little bit, the chip can’t find the captions. Perhaps there is a tension problem in which the tension on the tape in your VCR does not match the tension used when recording the tape, which affects the ability of the decoder to find and decode the captions. Sometimes a tape will seem to have very poor captions (garbled or missing or white boxes) when played on one VCR, but the captions are much improved when played on a di
