Channels & viewing

[greened2062]

I appreciate the answer but I'm trying to understand why I can watch an HBO Max program streaming through the Roku stick with closed captions on and working but when I select a different program and the closed caption settings option is set to "on always" no words appear on the screen. Thank you. 

[DBDukes]

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@greened2062 wrote:

I appreciate the answer but I'm trying to understand why I can watch an HBO Max program streaming through the Roku stick with closed captions on and working but when I select a different program and the closed caption settings option is set to "on always" no words appear on the screen. Thank you. 

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Because something on the HBO end of things is causing this. Could be the app. Could be the source content (they do have more than one copy of the movies they store on servers, after all). Could be a variety of things. It isn't the Roku.

[Saavy]

Don't know who to reply this to so I'll just add it to the end.

I posted feedback on HBO's site and they opened a case. There were all sorts of things they wanted me to try but I had already tried something on my own which is less satisfying but also less time consuming.

I eliminated Roku's global Closed Caption setting. (see my last comment)

I turned off Roku's closed caption setting, then restarted Roku. I'm using it to binge Succession on HBO so I don't need it right now. I clicked on HBO on the Roku home, pressed * and updated HBO. Then, in HBO, I clicked on settings in the lower left corner and turned on the global closed caption. Then I started an episode, clicked on the box in the lower right hand corner and set Audio to English Original and Subtitles to English CC.

It took a while to make this work every time. It's not a good solution if you want to use Closed Captions elsewhere. Basically what I did was treat the channel as if Roku had not created the global Closed Caption.

Before posting this message, I reviewed Roku's Accessibility setting and discovered that it is set to On Always. I played around with the settings a lot yesterday until it worked and I had to turn Roku's Accessibility setting to Off to make it happen. But now it's On. So I'm sorry, I can't tell you the exact way I did it, but it's working now and I'm not going to try anything else since it's working on the show I want to watch.

My last email to HboMax was that I did not want to try all their suggestions because one of the last steps was to reinstall HboMax. That involves changing the whole layout and I don't want to move all my channels around. I did mention that there are a lot of people in this discussion now and suggested they check out this thread.

Good luck !

[JoeCommenter]

Yeah, HBO Max support is worthless and this type of stuff seems to be solely their fault. I use a Roku Ultra. In my case, I have found two specific HBO Max shows where captions do not appear even when available and enabled. Captions on all other HBO Max shows work fine. Captions on shows on all other streaming channels work fine. Captions on HBO Max shows viewed on other devices work fine. I have rebooted the Ultra, and made sure both the Roku and HBO Max app have the most recent updates. I have also tried turning the Roku caption setting on and off, but my understanding is that streaming apps that have their own caption control menu simply disregard the Roku setting.

On one of the two shows with caption issues, I found a weird workaround. I start watching the show, then I pause it and turn on Spanish captions (using the caption button at the bottom right), then resume watching the show for a few seconds and the Spanish captions will appear. Then I pause it again and switch from Spanish captions to English captions. When I resume watching, the Spanish captions continue for a few seconds then English captions appear. At that point I can rewind to the beginning of the episode and watch with normal English captions. I need to do this workaround at the beginning of each episode.

On the other show with issues, Spanish captions are not available, so I can't use that workaround. I submitted this info to HBO Max, but all their replies just point me to generic fix-it links on the HBO site which I've already tried with no success. It seems clear that there is something about the captioning on the two shows that has been miscoded and is incompatible with HBO Max's Roku app. Since HBO writes their own app, I don't think there's anything Roku can do.

[greened2062]

Thanks for your suggestion using another language. I'll give it a try.

[marco32]

This worked for me too.