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Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

daiz.moe

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Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#21

Post by Daiz »

tmtvl wrote: post #18
Daiz wrote: post #2

This 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.

See for yourself: https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/215...

> 4. Line Treatment

> 2 lines maximum

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#22

Post by johnny22 »

charcircuit wrote: post #15

The 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.

you still need to subtitle the japanese text in signs, chat messages and other places that appear on the screen.

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#23

Post by NoahZuniga »

> With such typesetting-hostile standards to deal with, Crunchyroll had basically two choices for how to make sublicensing to Amazon and Netflix work with their existing subtitles that feature actual typesetting: Either 1) try to negotiate with the services for permission to make use of more TTML capabilities (that the subtitle renderers of said services should already support!) or 2) start mangling subtitles with typesetting into something compatible with the awful subtitling standards of the general streaming services.

Couldn't they also provide Amazon and Netflix a version of the video stream with baked in subtitles?

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#24

Post by Daiz »

charcircuit wrote: post #15

The 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.

Quality typesetting is just as important for dubs as it is for subs, actually! All that on-screen text will be there regardless of which audio track you are using.

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#25

Post by virtue3 »

transcriptase wrote: post #16
Daiz wrote: post #9

Earlier 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 possible incentive could they have for doing this?

I worked at crunchyroll.

Keeping the "hard subs" content is a lot of videos as the subtitles were encoded into the video stream.

This makes CDNs and other systems more difficult to utilize because we have a ton of video streams with just caption changes as opposed to just the Japanese audio source + caption files.

It's one of those things that doesn't seem that problematic till you include all the video_qualities to support streaming bandwith. So you also get a #hardSubLanguages * #videoQualities

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#26

Post by charcircuit »

johnny22 wrote: post #22
charcircuit wrote: post #15

The 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.

you still need to subtitle the japanese text in signs, chat messages and other places that appear on the screen.

I am saying that they can get away with lower quality subtitles in such places because the average user does not care that much about it. The target audience is not the same as when they first started doing subtitles and it doesn't make business sense anymore. Anime is not special. If the rest of the video streaming industry can get away with simpler subtitles, then Crunchyroll can too.

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#27

Post by arczyx »

kacesensitive wrote: post #12

It'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…

at this point you're probably better off going to a torrent site and search for 'dual-audio'

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#29

Post by khamidou »

virtue3 wrote: post #25
transcriptase wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What possible incentive could they have for doing this?

I worked at crunchyroll. Keeping the "hard subs" content is a lot of videos as the subtitles were encoded into the video stream. This makes CDNs and other systems more difficult to utilize because we have a ton of video streams with just caption changes as opposed to just the Japanese audio source + caption files. It's one of those things that doesn't seem that problematic till you include all the video_qualities to…

Obviously you probably thought about it but what about rendering the subtitles on top of the video stream? Was there a reason it was not possible (e.g DRMs?)

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#30

Post by Daiz »

NoahZuniga wrote: post #23

> With such typesetting-hostile standards to deal with, Crunchyroll had basically two choices for how to make sublicensing to Amazon and Netflix work with their existing subtitles that feature actual typesetting: Either 1) try to negotiate with the services for permission to make use of more TTML capabilities (that the subtitle renderers of said services should already support!) or 2) start mangling subtitles with ty…

Both services explicitly disallow this by default in their delivery specifications, unfortunately.

Netflix: https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/215...

> Netflix requires a non-subtitled version of the content. Netflix defines “non-subtitled” as the presence of main titles, end credits, location call-outs, and other supportive/creative text, but no burned-in subtitled dialogue, regardless of the language in the primary video.

Amazon: https://videocentral.amazon.com/support/delivery-experience/...

> Video

> Global packaging requires component asset packages to be delivered with a semi-textless video file that can be localized with discrete subtitles and audio dubbing.

> Also known as “Texted with no subtitles,” “Textless with main, ends, and graphic text,” and “Non-subtitled”, Prime Video defines semi-textless as a video master without burned-in subtitles, regardless of the language.

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