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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?

#401

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…

After watching The Boys season 3 I thought I was losing my listening comprehension of English. Glad to hear even native speakers struggle with modern movies. Karl Urban is great, but he just grumbles into his beard.

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

#402
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I've seen worse films from him, and worse acclaimed films this past couple years. In fact, 2 of the 6 movies I've watched the past couple years have been with Nicholas Cage, and I'm not even a fan of his. I don't know if it's just me but cinema has become really shit, unless you're into superhero movies. It's like nothing matters any more to executives and moviegoers of all ages than superheroes. Are we living in…

No, we’re living in a world where piracy and exploded budgets mean every movie needs to be a hit. One flop and the studio is gone. So the studios produce movies that are certain to be not flops, like the endless sequels, and that will draw people to cinemas where there is no piracy, which means impressive spectacles with explosions.

I'm sorry but piracy is not to blame for a 100 million movie budget. I live in a small country and we're able to produce very enjoyable films for far less than 10 million.

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

#403
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> and easy to setup.

We all know this isn’t gonna be true. Just another thing to faff about with that will stop working and have to be reset.

Even the effort of finding how to place it around my furniture doesn’t seem worth the effort to hear sound from different directions.

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

#405
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

It takes up space that some of us honestly don't have, especially people living in city apartments (like I do).

And I used to have a separate sound system at a past place, some many years ago, I don't think I'd be able to set it up again, it felt like black magic to set it up back then, it will surely feel the same (and more) now.

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

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The slurred dialog is obnoxious and a sign of laziness on everyone's part. The miking, the post processing, the overdubbing (if there's any at all - recent film makers don't seem to know that this is a thing). The actor's speech pattern, where they direct their speech while acting, even how they stand and where. The choice of location and additional preparation of the stage so the speech can be picked up clearly. It'…

A little off topic but it’s really surprising how so few of the shows and movies these days give off any vibe of sincerity. From the acting to the writing to the CGI, everything seems to be winking at the audience and trying to tell them that they are all actors and its all make believe. The perfect example is Lord of the Rings vs The Rings of Power. I had no problems believing that Aragorn really lived in Middle Ear…

A lot of the new 4K TVs by default have some 'video enhancement' processing steps turned on by default which ends up making everything look fake. If you go into the TV settings and turn all of those things off it should make the world look more natural.

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

#407
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Speaking as someone with a 5.1 system they haven't set up:

Getting the rear speakers' cables installed into your walls is expensive, and requires you own your home.

Getting a room large enough you can get several guests between the speakers without some of them ending up much closer to the speakers than others is even moreso.

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

#408
Reiterating the many "sound mixes are terrible, subtitles are vital" comments but also adding that my ears basically can't process more than one sound at a time - if there's external noise (someone commenting on the TV, the feral children outside, a party in the park across the square, washing machine / dishwasher, etc.), it'll interfere with my understanding of the dialogue. Hence subtitles.

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

#409

The fact that there's a claimed generational gap here speaks more to the values of the generations re: passive vs active entertainment. I could also ask: "Why do all these 60-Somethings have the TV on as background noise while doing other tasks?" To me it seems closed-caption usage is correlated with actually paying attention to television consumption. People who have their TV on at all hours, as background entertain…

I wish there was a CC mode for “I’m not deaf, I just don’t catch the quiet mumbly dialog sometimes so give me captions only of the dialog.” Bonus if it’s delayed by exactly 2 seconds, so that it doesn’t spoil jokes, and I can quickly reference it if I missed something someone said (helping me avoid fixating on the captions.) Because it’s the CC descriptions of music swells and things like “[laughs] and “[crying]”, et…

  mpv --sub-filter-sdh [--sub-filter-sdh-harder] --sub-delay=2
https://mpv.io/manual/master/#options-sub-filter-sdh

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

#410
There is also the reverse - I don't want hearing loss so I refuse to jack up the volume. Which in turn makes things harder to hear so captions help

Plus yeah they're a little lagged so helpful for multitasking if you miss a fraction of a sentence. Lets you recover from the gap without rewinding the vid

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