Most streaming companies are forgetting what they were competing with when they started out.
Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles
11–20 of 171 posts
Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles
#12It's so hard finding dubbed anime WITH subtitles. Like actually ridiculously hard.
My wife is deaf and I like dubbed so I can use my laptop while we chill but she literally needs subtitles so it's super annoying when a show either
1. Has no subtitles for dubbed.
2. Their subtitles are just the subbed version's subtitles which are drastically different from what the dubbed VAs are actually saying.
3. Has subtitles for some episodes but none for others seemingly randomly.
Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles
#13It's so hard finding dubbed anime WITH subtitles. Like actually ridiculously hard. My wife is deaf and I like dubbed so I can use my laptop while we chill but she literally needs subtitles so it's super annoying when a show either 1. Has no subtitles for dubbed. 2. Their subtitles are just the subbed version's subtitles which are drastically different from what the dubbed VAs are actually saying. 3. Has subtitles for…
Lack of closed captions and dubtitles are definitely very real issues as well, though this article is solely focused on subtitles.
Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't find an answer skimming: are they actively deleting old good subtitles and replacing with low-quality ones (as the title seems to suggest), have they simply changed their process for new subtitles, not spending as much to make nice ones? If they're actively deleting old good ones, that seems malicious.
I did find instances of them actively deleting old subtitles and replacing them with lower quality ones in the back catalog, yes. Which seems indicative of Crunchyroll wanting to eventually get rid of good subtitles altogether.
What reason would there be for removing old, loved subtitles? Licensing fees?
Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles
#15The mass market has already responded that they want dubbed anime. It doesn't make sense to invest into subtitles. Maybe it's time to accept that you are not the target audience anymore of western anime distributors.
Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't find an answer skimming: are they actively deleting old good subtitles and replacing with low-quality ones (as the title seems to suggest), have they simply changed their process for new subtitles, not spending as much to make nice ones? If they're actively deleting old good ones, that seems malicious.
I did find instances of them actively deleting old subtitles and replacing them with lower quality ones in the back catalog, yes. Which seems indicative of Crunchyroll wanting to eventually get rid of good subtitles altogether.
What possible incentive could they have for doing this?
Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did find instances of them actively deleting old subtitles and replacing them with lower quality ones in the back catalog, yes. Which seems indicative of Crunchyroll wanting to eventually get rid of good subtitles altogether.
What reason would there be for removing old, loved subtitles? Licensing fees?
Without knowing for sure, a conceivable strategy would be making it so that users who don't know that "good subs" can exist more readily accept "bad subs" as the standard. Same playbook as Google lobotomizing search and the index that search can access because that traditional search product is more efficacious than Gemini, which Google is trying to push on users.
Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles
#18This is the result of a ton of research into Crunchyroll's recent subtitle changes that have tanked the service's first-party presentation quality to an all-time low. The article ended up being quite long, so I highly appreciate anyone taking the time to read it in full!
Does Netflix really only allow 2 lines of subtitling on screen at a time? That's really stupid.
Also I remember when CR killed the Kodi plugin, that irked me enough to stick to DVD imports + fan subs for a while.
Finally, Ruri Rocks is such a good show, it got me to resubscribe to CR after not having subbed for years. If they screw with its subs I'm gonna root for this mess to bankrupt CR for good.
Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did find instances of them actively deleting old subtitles and replacing them with lower quality ones in the back catalog, yes. Which seems indicative of Crunchyroll wanting to eventually get rid of good subtitles altogether.
What reason would there be for removing old, loved subtitles? Licensing fees?
IIUC, it comes down to simplifying playback/subtitle rendering to the lowest common denominator among the various western streaming platforms.
The good/old subtitles in the ASS format required a more complex playback system than what Netflix/Hulu (and maybe blueray players) currently offer. This could be worked around by burning the subs into the video stream, but then you need to keep separate copies of your (large) video files for each subtitled language.
That doesn't seem like it'd be such a huge problem to me, but what do I know?
The post does a good job explaining the effective monopoly system at play that prevents real competition to provide any pressure to improve or maintain the prior quality.
Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did find instances of them actively deleting old subtitles and replacing them with lower quality ones in the back catalog, yes. Which seems indicative of Crunchyroll wanting to eventually get rid of good subtitles altogether.
What reason would there be for removing old, loved subtitles? Licensing fees?
Crunchyroll is currently using a subtitle rendering stack that is highly unique in the media industry, being based on the Advanced SubStation Alpha (ASS) subtitle format. It seems that the current executives would like to replace this unique stack with something more "industry standard" (and far less capable), but they can't do that as long as their back catalog is full of ASS subtitles - if they just switched stacks without doing anything else, all of these back catalog subtitles would just stop working completely. Which is why in order to perform such a stack switch, all old subtitles would need to be replaced with worse ones to make them compatible with the less capable new stack.