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Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles
31–40 of 171 posts
Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?)
This kind of softsubbing is what Crunchyroll primarily does, but it has hardsubbed encodes for devices that cannot do softsubbed rendering of the ASS subtitles that Crunchyroll uses. I go over some ways in how they could do away with these hardsubbed variants in the article without any notable loss in primary experience quality.
Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles
#33> 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…
Those vendors likely won’t accept hardsubs, because it would mean 10 video files for 10 languages, instead of soft subs where you get 1 video file 10 languages (10 different subtitle files).
But here’s the other thing - CR could have used the ASS subs on their website and given the less-dynamic sub files to their vendors. You can save a master subtitle file in whatever format you want.
Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Per the article, on top of this, the Crunchyroll subtitle authoring tools and the Crunchyroll player both use ASS. So the directive to have the “master” copy be the more widespread and limited TTML… means that many new shows are doing ASS-to-TTML-to-ASS conversions! Quite literally the lowest common denominator of shared functionality.
Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles
#35> 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…
Those vendors likely won’t accept hardsubs, because it would mean 10 video files for 10 languages, instead of soft subs where you get 1 video file 10 languages (10 different subtitle files). But here’s the other thing - CR could have used the ASS subs on their website and given the less-dynamic sub files to their vendors. You can save a master subtitle file in whatever format you want.
> CR could have used the ASS subs on their website and given the less-dynamic sub files to their vendors.
This is exactly what CR was doing for the past couple years, though you can't just automatically convert a fancy ASS file with typesetting into the limited kind of TTML subtitles that general streaming services expect, which is why Crunchyroll has been paying its subtitling staff extra to make those conversions semi-manually.
Though Crunchyroll could definitely improve its standard ASS workflows in ways that would make that conversion process significantly more automated with minimal extra effort on the subtitling staff's part. It wouldn't even be that hard, I've done something like that myself when I had to mangle ASS into limited WebVTT for some streaming work I did at one point.
Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?)
If you hardsub the video, then you need to have a full copy of the video for every language. That's the opposite of what people want. They want a single textless video source that can then accommodate any internationalization.
Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles
#37Earlier 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?
Lots of old CR content was fan subs which may or may not have followed any kind of "best practices". It was also a reason that CR struggled with legitimacy with the studios in the early days. They tried to remove content once a US company licensed a show as way to show they weren't pirates, but the friction was always there.
Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles
#38Considering how Crunchyroll started out by streaming ripped off anime content, hope they fail
Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)…
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 say Japanese and Chinese too for good measure).
So a single 2gb video goes from $1/yr to $10/yr, and you're not doing "the dumb simple thing" for subtitles which would basically 4x your cost over "commodity subtitling services".
Or "simplify, simplify simplify", you reduce costs (cha-ching!), and become compatible for syndication or redistribution (cha-ching!)
... and they would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for those meddling kids!
Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles
#40The 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.
That number varies depending on who you ask, with CR being one of the sources that claims a heavier share of dub watchers, but half their business is now dubbing/localization (by way of Funimation merger) so it may not be the most objective source.
Either way it’s bad business to throw some of your most loyal customers under the bus, regardless of how big of a portion they represent. Dub viewers tend to be more casual and fickle and will largely evaporate once the zeitgeist of popular media moves from anime onto something else.