261–270 of 298 posts
>see it as a cost-cutting measure to stop doing it. If only. I wish they would stop localizing it. Just give me the raw episodes. It seems like every site outside of Japan insists on ruing it by putting English on top of it. Unfortunately the economics of the situation means that sites will server the interests of tourists instead of otaku, so it's unlikely to ever change.
look, buddy, anime is mainstream now
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Are they price sensitive enough that they won't go to a competitor that's a few dollars more expensive per month if it has better subtitles Outside of Asia, Crunchyroll is a de-facto monopoly on legal anime. From the article, 70% of new releases are exclusive to Crunchyroll. They're not losing customers to platforms with better subs, because customers have no alternative. (Besides pirating, but I assume the golden…
> Crunchyroll is a de-facto monopoly Here's the answer right here...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why don't they take the timings from the closed captions of the original Japanese broadcast?
It’s a great question actually, and the answer has mostly to do with Romanization. Japanese and English are sufficiently structurally different, that even the sentence length won’t necessarily be one to one (eg subject and object inverted). Another thing that happens is time code shifts that come from differences in frame rate between source material and what the subtitlers end up with (eg 24 vs 23.98 if I’m remember…
Oh that's interesting. I've subscribed and unsubscribed to Crunchyroll more than once on my TV when I try to watch something and then it seems to have garbage subtitles. Sadly, I keep forgetting and clicking on them in Prime Video. I definitely wish we were back in the era of "keikaku means plan".
FYI, subtitles are often different between the Crunchyroll channel on Prime Video and “native” Crunchyroll. You aren’t getting the same on both.
Are they just bad now? The one I noticed was the "Kingdom" which is several years old. It had horrible subs because the sub were written by Chinese people using Chinese names for places and characters but the spoken language was Japanese. So the sub would say "General Mike is going to attack Houston" and the spoken Japanese would say "General Bob is going to attach Seattle" (fill in Mike and Houston with Chinese name…
> It had horrible subs because the sub were written by Chinese people using Chinese names for places and character More likely the translators, probably native English speakers, intentionally decided to use 'authentic', 'historical' Chinese names (as modern mandarn speakers would write them in pinyin) rather than the Japanese ones? I agree that the effect could be really confusing though, and it's not what I would do…
Kingdom at least has some connection to historical places/people so it kind of makes sense.
Thunderbolt Fantasy on the other hand is completely original/fictional in setting and characters, and yet still uses the Chinese names in the subtitles. While it is a joint Taiwanese-Japanese project, the only available audio is Japanese. So none of the completely made up names ever match between audio and subtitles.
And then there's Dragon Ball with e.g. Son Goku who is named after the Monkey King from Journey to the West but nobody ever refers to him as Sun Wukong.
> If you’re Crunchyroll, it’s easier to make just one version of the subtitles, than to have a Crunchyroll-specific one and another that you send out for ingestion for “Crunchyroll on Prime Video” and “Crunchyroll on YouTube.” I will mention that youtube has pretty good subtitle capabilities, even if they're rarely used.
Yep, their srv3 format is very usable, although it is in many ways inferior to ASS (animations have to be done manually in discrete timesteps, although YTSubConverter does that for you I think, and no crazy stuff like shape drawing or 3d transforms). Does support ruby text though which ASS currently doesn't.
I think the worst thing about it is actually that YouTube is not doing very well in getting people to use it. For example they don't support most of the format's functionality in any client that isn't the web one[1]. Additionally I don't think there's even an official way to create these complex subtitles, you have to use unofficial tools like YTSubConverter.
If anyone is interested, I am working on a library for rendering srv3 (and some WebVTT) here[2]. Maybe if we had widespread support people would use it more? That seems like very wishful thinking though :)
[1] I suspect this is because they have to work within the constraints of whatever UI frameworks they're using for apps. It does not seem possible to implement compliant web text layout (pretty complicated!) on top of such higher level systems.
Hah, this is my time to shine. I worked in anime subtitling and timing for a number of years. I helped write our style guide — things like how to handle signs, overlapping dialogue, colors etc. It wound up being quite a large document! But the thing to realize here is that, all of these subs have to be placed by hand. There are AI tools that can help you match in and out times, but they have a difficult time matching…
How many customers watch each episode of popular shows? 100k+? And we're talking a difference of ~7 hours of labor. $200 difference at most?
YES where do I sign the petition to revert this terrible change?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Worth noting though, those monoliths themselves come with tradeoffs; artists don't earn shit for streaming, which is why the only way to really "support" one anymore is concerts and merch. And don't get me wrong I love concerts and merch, but I'd rather people earn a reasonable living without needing to be on tour basically in perpetuity.
How much of this is actually new to the streaming era? Radio stations may have paid better per play/listener, but they had finite airtime and so fewer songs got played and fewer artists got paid. Physical media may have paid better compared to streaming the same songs once, but the media could be copied and replayed infinitely. There was a lot of unrealistic hype that software magic could make everything between the…
What streaming has cannibalized is album sales, which is the problematic aspect. The fixed price-per-month to access a vast library of music is a killer value prospect for the consumer, which is why Spotify et al have succeeded as they have. However, again, it's bad for the artists; they don't make shit. And I mean, think about the economics there and it'll become evident why: previously to access between 10 and 20 songs depending on the album costed you about $10-15, one time purchase, but it was yours for the life of the media. Now you're paying (if you're paying) about $15-20 per month to access all of the music ever. And yeah there's less cost, no printed CDs, no shipping, no retail markup, but come on, if you have 4 CDs in your spotify library and are on the most expensive family plan, which IIRC is about $30/month, you're already ahead by 50%. That doesn't bode well for the artist's revenue split.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That’s why the best subs, are always fan subs! Because a business will never put in 8x more time on an episodes subtitles than “bare minimum.” Cannot overstate this enough. Fans are the ones who actually care. To an almost pathological degree. Anime fansubbing is a major reason why our video players even have excellent subtitling support to begin with. Many music fans will obssess over ripping quality and lossless…
There's a direct equivalent in the world of anime: frame-per-frame restoration like the GITS Blu-Ray ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40316985 ) or the '99 HxH anime and LaserDisc scans.