131–140 of 171 posts
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> that have tanked the service's first-party presentation quality to an all-time low Would you pirate for better subtitles? Assuming Crunchroll has the legal rights to the content pinned down, that may be the only way to apply legitimate pressure.
Irony is Crunchyroll, started as a pirate service.
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It's an X*N*N problem: n_videos, bitrates, formats. Assuming each video in its largest bitrate is... 2gb for example, and assuming S3 is $0.025/gb, that's a nickle per month or let's say $0.50/yr for that video. Next up is reduced bitrates, assume you go from 2gb to 1gb and finally 500mb. Round up and you're at $1/video. Now duplicate it to AV1 and MP4, and multiply that by English, French, and Spanish (oh, and let's…
Except ASS streams really aren't that big and don't have to be stored with each encode. They can just be in a separate file. And this is how cr used to serve them. Before they used hardware drm you could just download all of the separate sub tracks. You don't need to multiply anything here, except the number of sub streams. One is ass, the other the primitive standards Netflix and other surges use.
Edit: and to the peer comment regarding S3 vs self host: regardless of 10x cloud cost, it's still 10x volume. Where 1TB local would do, now you need 10TB (10x the cost).
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The article claims that you can slice up the video and only use language-specific hardsubs for parts that need it. I'd be interested if there are technical reasons that can't be done.
It's incredibly fragile at the CDN level if deployed at scale for a start. You'd see playback issues go up by 1000%. In the nicest possible way, it is pretty clear that this article was written by somebody who has only ever looked at video distribution as a hobbyist and not deploying it at scale to paying customers who quite reasonably get very upset at things not working reliably.
As someone who doesn't watch anime, this article reminds me of when a coworker sends a screenshot with zero context and says something like "is this supposed to be like this?" Maybe it's a spectrum thing, but I find it beyond lazy and insulting. In the article, there's zero explanation of what the actual issue is, at least in the first few paragraphs. It just seems to say the subtitles are bad with some examples and…
The gist of it is this: Subtitles were a huge part of anime culture.
1. Subtitles were great at one point. Demonstration is this video: https://daiz.moe/content/crunchyroll/klk-underwater-1.mp4 The English subtitles are so well integrated, that they feel like they are part of the original scene. But actually, they are added in post!
In these times, great subtitles were done by a vibrant, legally grey, dedicated subculture. Subtitling, at this point, is about craftsmanship, and appreciation of culture. Anime at this point is a niche, even though becoming more and more popular in the West.
2. Subtitles are becoming more like this: https://daiz.moe/content/crunchyroll/mha-funi-hulu.jpg
Anime at this point is mainstream in the West. This is the corporate version of the same, where subtitling is seen as a problem to be solved as cheaply as possible. The culture around it seems to be dissolved, as the subtitles are now determined by corporate issues, not craftsmen, or connoisseurs.
A similar issue has been plaguing the manga industry since "The Great Scanlator Purge" that took place a few years ago, leaving only the "official" Viz media-contracted translators in the wake of the ruins. For some reason, this change came with a general unwillingness on the translators part to correct, or translate, concepts that virtually all fan translators would've been happy to do. Here's some examples (there a…
Footnotes and endnotes always carry a hidden burden: They interrupt the reading flow and direct the mind of the reader away from the characters and the plot and towards linguistics. If the translator follows a philosophy that prioritizes the subjective experience of the reader over a deeper understanding of the material, this "mode switch" is something he will try to avoid. Personally, I tend to agree that a need to…
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What Netflix supports on their main website might not be what they care about, though; you used to be able to watch Netflix on the Nintendo Wii, and they probably still have some users on stupidly old smart TVs.
Also fun fact - subtitles did not work on the Wii at all if you were running a video streaming service! The BBC spent literally years trying to engineering something that did not result in it being unable to playback video smoothly and failed.
Considering how Crunchyroll started out by streaming ripped off anime content, hope they fail
It has been a loooong time since that. I'm pretty happy they not only went the legal route, but also were successful doing it while retaining a relatively large library. They could have failed and shut down. Remember that back then, Japanese producers didn't take overseas demand seriously, many of them don't even know that it existed or that there were many fansubs.
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Well... the very first paragraph of the article does say with highlighting how "the presentation quality for translations of on-screen text has taken a total nosedive". And then it shows visual examples of the new bad quality and gives comparison screenshots demonstrating good quality shortly after.
A small suggestion: ask a friend of yours who don't regularly watch anime to read your article for 20 seconds, and see if they can explain what it is about. I spent quite some hours on CR, yet it was maybe until 30 seconds later before I realized what the "nosedive" refers to exactly. In fact, I kept thinking "quality" refers to "translation quality" and I was puzzled I could not see obvious issues. It doesn't need t…
There is a solution: learn Japanese!
