10. A method to detect garbled closed captioning data, comprising: receiving an encoded video data stream containing closed captioning data; decoding the encoded video data stream, and to reorder frames in the encoded video stream into display order detecting closed captioning data in the decoded, reordered video data stream; 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 as a total data element count; storing a count of the total number of data elements in the closed captioning data having a particular characteristic in the memory as a total data element characteristic count; determining a metric as a function of the total data element count and the total data element characteristic count; and providing an alert in accordance with the determined metric.
15. The method recited in claim 10 , further comprising detecting closed captioning data in MPEG-2 format or MPEG-4 format.