Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 163 posts

Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#111

Post by Mashimo »

huijzer wrote: post #80
c16 wrote: post #47

Very excited for this, but a waste of energy if everyone is needing to process their video in real time.

Why are we still talking about this? Computers are INCREDIBLY efficient and still become orders of magnitude more efficient. Computation is really negligible in the grand scheme of things. In the 80s some people also said that our whole world energy would go to computations in the future. And look today. It’s less than 1%. We do orders of magnitude more computations, but the computers have become orders of magnitude…

> Should I turn off my laptop when I go to the supermarket?

Yes.

Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#112

Post by close04 »

diggan wrote: post #67
jl6 wrote: post #52

There's an art to subtitling that goes beyond mere speech-to-text processing. Sometimes it's better to paraphrase dialog to reduce the amount of text that needs to be read. Sometimes you need to name a voice as unknown, to avoid spoilers. Sometimes the positioning on the screen matters. I hope the model can be made to understand all this.

> Sometimes it's better to paraphrase dialog to reduce the amount of text that needs to be read Please no. Some subtitle companies do think like this, and it's really weird, like when they try to "convert" cultural jokes, and then add in a bunch of more assumptions regarding what cultures you're aware of depending on the subtitle language, making it even harder to understand... Just because I want my subtitles in Eng…

> Spanish food names to be replaced by "kind of the same" British names

The purpose of a translation is after all to convey the meaning of what was said. So for example you'd want the English "so so" to be translated in Spanish as "más o menos" instead of repeating the translation of "so" twice. You don't want to just translate word for word, venir infierno o alta agua.

A lot of dialog needs language specific context, many expressions don't lend themselves to literal translation, or the translation in that language is long and cumbersome so paraphrasing is an improvement.

Like with anything else, the secret is using it sparingly, only when it adds value.

Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#114

Post by jodrellblank »

magic_smoke_ee wrote: post #102
baal80spam wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not pay for the energy you use?

> don't cross-examine https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> That's what a software engineer would say who views resources as unlimited and free.

from the same guidelines: don't be snarky; don't post thoughtless insubstantive comments; reply to the argument instead of calling names; don't sneer; respond to the strongest interpretation - assume good faith; eschew flamebait; don't trample curiosity.

Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#115

Post by xattt »

diggan wrote: post #67
jl6 wrote: post #52

There's an art to subtitling that goes beyond mere speech-to-text processing. Sometimes it's better to paraphrase dialog to reduce the amount of text that needs to be read. Sometimes you need to name a voice as unknown, to avoid spoilers. Sometimes the positioning on the screen matters. I hope the model can be made to understand all this.

> Sometimes it's better to paraphrase dialog to reduce the amount of text that needs to be read Please no. Some subtitle companies do think like this, and it's really weird, like when they try to "convert" cultural jokes, and then add in a bunch of more assumptions regarding what cultures you're aware of depending on the subtitle language, making it even harder to understand... Just because I want my subtitles in Eng…

There was an eminent Russian voiceover artist (goblin?) that translated pirated Western movies with his own interpretation.

His translations were nowhere near what the movie was about, but they were hilarious and fit the plot perfectly.

Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#116

Post by mossTechnician »

portaouflop wrote: post #61
mossTechnician wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has already rolled out AI-generated subtitles for Crunchyroll anime. I discovered this while watching Last Exile, a show that has already been subtitled and dubbed in English. It's funny for a second, and then incredibly frustrating after that. Character names are regularly wrong, and sentences get rewritten to have different meanings. Instead of just reading subtitles, you have to mentally evaluate them for e…

You get what you pay for I guess. Translators are paid pennies and AI is making it much worse. Who in their right mind would aspire to become a professional translator today?

That's the part that really confuses me. Somebody already did pay for translation from Japanese to English subtitles, then for a voice cast to dub the anime. The original subtitles are nowhere to be found; the closed captions are based on the English language dub.

Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#117

Post by xdennis »

torben-friis wrote: post #19

I recently used some subtitles that I later found out had been AI generated. The experience wasn't really good to be honest - the text was technically correct but the way multiline phrases were split made them somehow extremely hard to parse. The only reason I learned AI was involved is that it was bad enough for me to stop viewing and check what was wrong. Hopefully it's an implementation detail and we'll see better…

As a Romanian, I'm so sick of AI translations on YouTube, especially since they use Google's translation (OpenAI's at least works quite well). Here's an example (translated back to English):

> Man Builds Background of Tan for Swedish House

It's completely puzzling. To understand it you have to know both English and Romanian. "Background of tan" is the term for "foundation" (makeup) in Romanian. That is, "foundation" has two meanings in English: for a house and for makeup, but Google uses the wrong one.

Automatic translation is full of these bad associations. I have no idea how people who don't speak English understand these translations.

Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#118

Post by imiric »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #64
n144q wrote: post #30

me: waiting years for VLC to fix basic usability issues and reconcile UI across different platforms VLC: we're gonna work on AI

This boils down to software development not being free. In VLC's case, the development is funded by several for profit companies (like videolabs) that make their money from stuff they do with VLC (consulting, commercial services, etc.). VLC is a good example of an OSS project that is pretty well run with decades of history that has a healthy ecosystem of people and companies earning their living supporting all that a…

> Like many OSS products, it looks and feels like product made by techies for techies.

That's not the problem. mpv is another media player that is arguably even more "made by techies for techies", yet it doesn't have the usability issues of VLC, and is a much more robust piece of software.

VLC is just poorly designed from the ground up, and the project's priorities are all over the place, as this AI initiative demonstrates.

Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#119

Post by diggan »

aquova wrote: post #101
diggan wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're already using Jellyfin, then why not? Don't want to complicate the stack?

I've seen this sentiment a lot, and it's always confused me a bit. I only use Jellyfin as well, I've never really seen the appeal of the *arr stack. I really don't see the appeal of having a firehose pointed at my Jellyfin instance, which requires like eight additional services that need to run.

> I've never really seen the appeal of the *arr stack

Automation I suppose. I only run Sonarr/Radarr, so two additional services. They both work exactly the same, so it's basically "configure once, run twice".

I eventually ran out of patience to find the right releases and what not, and now enjoy a life where I can just input the title, then return one hour later to everything setup for me. Any new episodes/movies will just be available automatically in Jellyfin next time I open it up on the TV. Helps that other people in the household are also able to use it, so we've got rid of all streaming services now.

Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#120

Post by PoignardAzur »

adinisom wrote: post #103
torben-friis wrote: post #19

I recently used some subtitles that I later found out had been AI generated. The experience wasn't really good to be honest - the text was technically correct but the way multiline phrases were split made them somehow extremely hard to parse. The only reason I learned AI was involved is that it was bad enough for me to stop viewing and check what was wrong. Hopefully it's an implementation detail and we'll see better…

On Youtube I really like the auto-generated captions and often prefer them to the creator's because: - Sometimes the creator bases their captions on the script and misses changes in edit - Sometimes the creator's captions are perfect transcriptions but broken up and timed awkwardly Auto-generated captions aren't always perfect but unlike human captions provide word-by-word timing.

Yeah, I definitely wish other media would experiment with Youtube-style word-at-a-time subtitles. They often feel a lot more natural than full-sentence subtitles, the way they stream in is better at providing "connecting tissue", they never spoil upcoming reveals the way subtitles tend to, etc.

(By "connecting tissue", I mean they don't have the problem where sentence A is "I like chocolate", sentence B is "only on special occasions", and at the time B appears A is completely gone, but you really need A and B to be onscreen at the same time to parse the full meaning intuitively.)

Post reply on HN