I had forgotten about this thread until tonight. I said in my earlier post that we had not gotten HDTV. Well, in April of this year, we did; bought two new TVs, in fact, a 22 inch for the bedroom and a 40" LCD HDTV for the living room and high definition DirecTV satellite service. As I said, my hearing is so bad that I don't even try to watch TV unless it's closed captioned. Everything was fine until last night when I noticed the captioning wasn't working. I accused Margaret of pushing the wrong buttons, but she denied it. Using the menu of the DirecTV remote showed that the captioning was ON. Using the menu for the Samsung TV, the "caption" option was greyed out so I couldn't get to it or change it. Captioning worked on the bedroom TV (it's a high definition TV, but not a HD converter or receiver box), so I figured the problem had to be the TV instead of the satellite.
So I stopped by Best Buy this morning and the young men there said they'd never heard of such a thing, but told me to call the 888 number for a service call. So when I got home, I did that and scheduled a service call for tomorrow afternoon.
But then later today, I got to searching on google and found lots of forum discussions by people with the same problem, but no good solutions. Some said they contacted DirecTV with no results. One had a link to a magazine article about problems with the HDMI interface, digital vs. analog, and all kinds of stuff way over my head. So I got the bright idea of dragging out one of my VCR tapes that I knew was closed captioned and lo and behold, it worked.
So now I figure maybe it ain't the TV after all. So I called DirecTV, got a very pleasant young lady (well, she sounded young anyway) who had me do all the things I'd already done with the two remotes, the menu changes, etc., plus simply pushing the "Exit" button on the DirecTV remote that she said frequently fixes such problems, but in this case did absolutely nothing. So she asked me to hold while she went and checked some things.
When she came back, she asked me if I had tried resetting the converter box; i.e., open the little door on the front where the access card is and push the red reset button. No, I had not tried that, but did it. Instant fix!
Only took 24 hours, two phone calls, and a trip to Best Buy to get to the simplest cure of all.
