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Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

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Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#331

Post by vel0city »

jader201 wrote: post #306
IgorPartola wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait it isn’t because 5.1 became the norm for recording movies bust most people have a 2.0 or a 2.1 setup at most? I thought that was the conventional wisedom.

> most people have a 2.0 or a 2.1 setup at most Wait, is this true? I’ve always thought I was in the minority for “still” having “just” 2.0. I’ve been needing to upgrade my receiver for a while, but mostly putting it off since I can’t find a decent 2.0 one with a good number of inputs. Almost every receiver is (5+2n).1 these days (where n >= 0). I feel so behind the times in my simple 2.0 system, even though I think…

A massive number of people don't have anything other than the speakers included in their TV. The next massive percentage of people maybe have a sound bar, maybe with an included subwoofer.

A tiny, minuscule, microscopic percentage of consumers will have an external receiver. Maybe they'll have 5.1 on that. Maybe they'll have 9.2. An extremely small fraction, practically a rounding error, will have higher than that.

Most of my extended family is decently well off in the US. Among a dozen or so households, I'm one of I think two with an actual receiver, and I've only got a 5.1 setup. A few have a sound bar on their fancy movie watching setup. Most of my friends rely on the included speakers on their TVs. Its just not a priority for a lot of people, even people with enough income to afford vacation homes and boats and what not.

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#332

Post by phist_mcgee »

thelittleone wrote: post #220
jamesbfb wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have paid extra for subtitles when I saw Tenet at IMAX. The audio mix made it extremely difficult to follow.

All I wanted after seeing Tenet was my time back.

And inverted you wants your time forward

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#333

Post by Too »

least wrote: post #150
ryandrake wrote: post #136

One more vote for terrible audio mixes and one for actors who mumble their dialog. Whenever I watch movies with my wife, we constantly have to fiddle with the remote control. The loud parts (including explosions and music) are too loud for her, so we have to turn the volume down during those parts, but the dialog is too quiet and mumbly for me to hear, so we turn the volume up during those parts. We now just keep the…

The Apple TV has a setting called "reduce loud sounds" which helps with this problem. I'm sure you can find it on other devices too. My Sony TV also has a sound setting for enhanced dialogue which might help as well. Can't really help with the actors thing, though I think I'd rather characters that are truer to life than sound like they're acting on stage, personally.

That option actually works great for resurrecting the speech in a movie, but makes all the music utterly flat and boring. With this option on you might as well throw out your expensive speaker setup and use the built in TV speaker.

If only there was a hotkey to toggle it on and off, instead of hidden 4 levels down the touch-and-swipe menu.

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#334

Post by bhj »

Upgrayyed_U wrote: post #323
lttlrck wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried night mode? It compresses the dynamic range.

The problem with night mode is that it compresses the dynamic range of the audio which undermines one of the main benefits of having a home theater system. It's a poor compromise for bad audio mixing.

Most home theater systems are in a home where the noise floor is significantly higher than a theater, which the audio mix was targeting. Dynamic range compression is often appropriate and when applied correctly improves the experience in homes.

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#335

Post by zaroth »

epistasis wrote: post #292
IgorPartola wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait it isn’t because 5.1 became the norm for recording movies bust most people have a 2.0 or a 2.1 setup at most? I thought that was the conventional wisedom.

It's hard to believe that TVs are still so buggy that they would intentionally play 5.1 in an unusable way on regular TVs. Of all the ways to deal with the situation, just adding up all the channels equally and dumping them out has to be the stupidest. It's ruined so many people's experiences over the years.

There’s been a bug for years in the Apple TV VLC app where it plays the audio channels on the wrong speakers.

Center channel ends up on back right or something totally ridiculous. There’s an open issue on the bug tracker. It’s wild.

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#336

Post by ruuda »

ryandrake wrote: post #136

One more vote for terrible audio mixes and one for actors who mumble their dialog. Whenever I watch movies with my wife, we constantly have to fiddle with the remote control. The loud parts (including explosions and music) are too loud for her, so we have to turn the volume down during those parts, but the dialog is too quiet and mumbly for me to hear, so we turn the volume up during those parts. We now just keep the…

If you use MPV, you can pass it ffmpeg filters, and ffmpeg has many ways of compressing the dynamic range. See [1] for the set of audio filters. Here are the settings I use [2]. If you can't run your video through ffmpeg, I guess you could run your audio signal through a physical compressor if you use external speakers, but that can get quite involved.

[1]: https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#acompressor [2]: https://github.com/ruuda/dotfiles/blob/fff8d1d905767e85b57d7...

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#337

Post by Too »

Not mentioned in the article is the type of content watched. Concluding the audio mixing disaster discussed above, one theory would be: Young people watch fast Marvel actions with explosions and terrible audio mixing. Old people watch slow crime mysteries with no background music.

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#338

Post by tsimionescu »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #328
tsimionescu wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the actor's intention is to mumble instead of enunciatiting clearly (presumably because of some notion of authenticity), then they will also mumble the studio takes. It's not a problem of sound volume/background noise, which ADR can fix, it's a problem of style over ease of understanding the dialogue. This mirrors the problem of TV series sometimes becoming too dark to easily follow the action on a TV screen in us…

Those scenes look amazing on good TVs. Making bad screens show them well seems like a problem for the producers of bad screens to solve.

99.9% of the audience will strain to see what is going on, but let's blame their screen buying acumen (and their viewing practices - even the best screen will not make those scenes easily watchable in a sunny room, which is how most people watch TV) instead of making them actually watchable.

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#339

Post by zaroth »

vel0city wrote: post #331
jader201 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most people have a 2.0 or a 2.1 setup at most Wait, is this true? I’ve always thought I was in the minority for “still” having “just” 2.0. I’ve been needing to upgrade my receiver for a while, but mostly putting it off since I can’t find a decent 2.0 one with a good number of inputs. Almost every receiver is (5+2n).1 these days (where n >= 0). I feel so behind the times in my simple 2.0 system, even though I think…

A massive number of people don't have anything other than the speakers included in their TV. The next massive percentage of people maybe have a sound bar, maybe with an included subwoofer. A tiny, minuscule, microscopic percentage of consumers will have an external receiver. Maybe they'll have 5.1 on that. Maybe they'll have 9.2. An extremely small fraction, practically a rounding error, will have higher than that. M…

What a shame though! A decent 5.1 setup should be cheap and easy to setup.

Of course that’s far from the truth, but good sound is so worth it! Being able to truly enjoy music, movies, we live in an incredible era for content, video is regularly available in 4K and people can play that!

Why is sound stuck so far behind?

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#340

Post by zoid_ »

Having young kids makes subtitles essential if you want to watch the news or any other low quality media in the background whilst they are playing!

Got used to it after a couple of years and found them useful for deciphering speech that would otherwise be missed.

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