Patent ID: 6972802

Claim:
For use in connection with home television video recording, playback, and viewing equipment, apparatus for processing an electronic signal including audio and video portions corresponding to audible and visible portions of the electronic signal, with said audio portion containing a spoken component related to the audible portion and with said video portion containing an auxiliary information component corresponding to a visible representation of said spoken component of said electronic signal, said apparatus comprising: a closed caption data slicer arranged to receive a video portion of an electronic signal with said video portion containing an auxiliary information component to produce a closed caption signal; an on-screen display connected to receive said closed caption signal; a video path by which video portions of the electronic signal are made available to a user of the apparatus; an audio path by which audio portions of the electronic signal are made available to a user of the apparatus; a programmable controller including a data memory having a plurality of text libraries; at least two library memories, each of said library memories adapted to store undesirable words or phrases, and one of said library memories having additional undesirable words or phrases not present in the other of said library memories; said programmable controller having a closed caption editor for analyzing said auxiliary information component to determine if said auxiliary information component contains undesirable words or phrases stored in a selected library of said at least two library memories; said closed caption editor being adapted to compare characters of closed caption segments with characters of such undesirable words or phrases from said at least two library memories for detection thereof and replace any detected undesirable word or phrase with another word or phrase from a selected library of said memory component to produce a modified closed caption signal for said on-screen display; an audio switch in said audio path for selectively modifying a corresponding audio portion of said electronic signal if undesirable words or phrases are detected within an auxiliary information component segment; said audio switch being controlled to cease modifications at the conclusion of receipt of the modified auxiliary information component segment; an operations and mode controller for controlling display of a modified auxiliary information component at the time such undesirable word or phrase is replaced and adapted to provide greater or lesser numbers of undesirable words or phrases from said at least two library memories to said closed caption editor for operation thereof; and an on-screen display plus video combining unit connected in said video path to produce an auxiliary information component incorporating said modified closed caption signal in said video path.