18. The method recited in claim 10 , further comprising detecting closed captioning data in MPEG-2 format or MPEG-4 format.
10. A method to detect garbled closed captioning data, comprising: detecting closed captioning data in the video data stream; identifying and extracting individual data elements from the closed captioning data; storing a count of the total number of data elements in the closed captioning data in a memory based on the determined data element boundary; storing a count of the total number of data elements having a particular data element characteristic in the closed captioning data in the memory; determining a percentage of data elements having the particular data element characteristic in the closed captioning data as a ratio of the count of the number of data elements in the closed captioning data having the particular data element characteristic to the count of the total number of words in the closed captioning data; and providing an alert when the determined percentage exceeds a predetermined threshold.