9. The system recited in claim 1 , wherein the closed captioning data detector is capable of detecting closed captioning data in MPEG-2 format or MPEG-4 format.
1. A system to detect garbled closed captioning data, comprising: a closed captioning data detector to detect closed captioning data in a video data stream; a data extractor to extract individual data elements from the closed captioning data; a data counter to count a total number of data elements in the closed captioning data and store the total data element count in a memory, and to count a total number of data elements having a particular characteristic in the closed captioning data and to store the data element characteristic count in the memory; a percentage threshold detector to determine 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 data elements in the closed captioning data; and an alert that is provided when the determined percentage exceeds a predetermined threshold.