The Middleman - Complete Series

The Closed Caption Conundrum

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Middleman Middlereview Middlemaddness

My copy of the Middleman DVD box set from Shout! Factor finally arrived yesterday, and after much anticipation (and drooling over the intricate packaging) Nadia and I watched the first episode (“The Pilot Episode Sanction”), and it was greatly enjoyed… By me. She also liked it, but not quite as much as I did. Not because she didn’t enjoy it, or think it funny or a great show (she compared it, favorably, to Firefly, which is bot a major plus and some major nerd cred right there), but because of the language barrier.

Which brings me to the point of this posting: Why is it so damn hard to get Closed Captioning working while playing back a DVD? Shout!, for whatever reason, decided it would be better to have the captions on this set as Closed Captions, instead of subtitles. I’m not sure why this is – subtitles are simple to use from a consumer standpoint, and universally supported from a player standpoint. But CC? Not so much.

The PS3 will not pass CC through HDMI – in fact, a quick bit of google-fu shows that this is a pretty standard, known problem. So, my $400 media monster won’t allow my girlfriend to know everything that’s said on this show.

You Microsoft fanboys can just shut the hell up now too – it also will not pass the CC information through. Or, if it does, it does so in a very odd, unintuitive way – which is basically the same thing. So that’s another $300 well spent.

Thankfully, my Mac mini, which I use for a media center anyway – not only has DVD playback baked into the OS (why any modern OS wouldn’t have this feature I’ll never understand), but it does fully support CC. Which is why we’ll be watching Middleman on a computer via DVD…

The box set is great – the package is great, with lots of neat touches, the picture quality is freat, the sound quality is wonderful… But the fact that so much work had to be done just to get the damn CC working (Total time spent dicking around: half an hour… on over a $1000 worth of equipment) makes Shout!’s choice of captioning a fail in my eyes.

I would still reccomend this set to anyone who likes fun, unless they were deaf. In which case, it’s just too much of a hassle.

Seriously, Shout! – Get your act together soon.

Firefly - 15 episodes of awesome

Recently, Nadia and I started watching Firefly… It’s her first time through the Verse, and probably my fourth. A great little show – if a bit hard to explain to new comers – it was cut down in its prime, and resurrected only long enough to give us an amazing movie.

But I’m not talking about the movie – not yet. We’ll wait until Nadia has had a chance to see it before we talk about it, eh? That’s right – No f’ing spoilers.

It’s been a lot of fun watching this with her. She’s gone from scrunching up her face in mild confusion (and possible displeasure) at the idea of a “western in space” to actively demanding we watch another few episodes. We are rapidly running out of episodes to watch (damn you Fox, and your cancelation of this fine show) and will quickly have the whole thing wrapped up.

It’s been fun getting another opinion on the show, another take on the characters and how they interact. It’s made me appreciate the show all over again.

I have no idea what to watch once we’re done with this. I’d say Middleman, but the DVD’s won’t be out for another month… and we need those subtitles, dang it.