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Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats

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Re: Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats

#331

Post by fingerlocks »

jonas21 wrote: post #47

At least you got a reason from Google. I have an update to an iOS app that's been stuck in review for two weeks now with zero feedback from Apple other than boilerplate responses from support. This is causing me serious stress as I have no idea how long it's going to be in this state and I rely on this and another app for 100% of my income.

I had this happen once, and I finally gave up and removed the app from review.

I re-built it with a newer version of Xcode, bumped the version the number, resubmitted. It was approved the next day.

Re: Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats

#332

Post by kuschku »

Hamuko wrote: post #330
kuschku wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And while there are ways to implement ASS in the browser, those require compiling the one single ASS library that actually works (because it’s an implementation-defined format, ofc) to WASM and running that in the browser. With the expected performance issues. Now try running that on a Chromecast >_> The fansubbing community is just so stuck in weird formats which provide no benefit except a virtual moat preventing n…

Can you watch Crunchyroll on a Chromecast? They at least use ASS in the browser.

Sure, but only the english subtitle, and you can’t disable it. For Chromecast, you have to use the burned-in subtitles.

Which is expected, considering the hardware just isn’t powerful enough for ASS subtitles (to get good performance, even on a desktop you’ll want a recent CPU and at least 1-2GB of RAM): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromecast#Model_comparison

Re: Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats

#333

Post by kuschku »

gaius_baltar wrote: post #239
Hamuko wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely. For example, MTBB's subtitles for Kimi no Na wa are very impressive. There's a short showcase of them on YouTube (spoilers): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_c-eKTisI0 It's a shame you basically cannot get anything close to the quality of fansubs from any commercial/legal options.

> It's a shame you basically cannot get anything close to the quality of fansubs from any commercial/legal options. Fansubbers work for the shows they love while the commercial distributors just pick the cheapest option to get the thing done ASAP, don't matter how sh*tty the result is. There is no chance for quality here. The same happens with Blurays x rips streams: piracy is the best option (no DRM, no unskippable…

> Fansubbers work for the shows they love while the commercial distributors just pick the cheapest option to get the thing done ASAP, don't matter how sh*tty the result is. There is no chance for quality here.

I wouldn’t call subtitles that require about a GB of RAM to process and don’t even get 20fps on an i7-6700 "quality". That’s just a bunch of shitty hacks people accept because there’s no alternative.

ASS is a horrible format (three implementations, only a single well-working implementation, performance hungry, etc), and almost all of the benefits of ASS can also be had with e.g. TTML without the issues.

And stuff like rendering the same line hundreds of times to get a gradient effect or blurred background is absolutely wasteful, especially because it’s just a hack to work around the broken ASS limitations.

Re: Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats

#334

Post by grishka »

int_19h wrote: post #325
grishka wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As another native Russian speaker, "i" isn't the most common transliteration for "й", and that's what bothers me here. "Hui" would be a plural, with an "и". Й is usually written as "y" or "j". Except when you're getting an international passport, then there's a good chance your name will end with "ii" because the federal migration service hates you.

It's not the most common transliteration, but it's common enough; and even in Cyrillic, if you see "и" where "й" would normally be expected, you'd usually read it like the latter; e.g. "йод" is sometimes spelled "иод", but everybody will read it the same. Given that the written distinction between и/й dates back to Peter's civil script reform, and that it wasn't even considered a separate letter of the alphabet until…

Hm. I thought Й was being used in the old style (pre-1918) writing as well? At least this[1] translator keeps it in masculine adjectives. Though it doesn't keep the dots on a Ё. I've never seen И substituted for Й, but Ё -> Е is common, especially in names (for example some people write "Артем" but everyone still reads it as if there's a "ё").

[1] http://slavenica.com

Re: Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats

#335

Post by wombatpm »

SilasX wrote: post #310
wombatpm wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short retention according to who? That server only? No copies to the NSA? I’m a trust but verify kind of guy and with just the word of Apple I assume somebody is keeping the data and using it in some way.

Agree with such skepticism but what are you replying to there? My comment was saying that it cached the cert check for a bizarrely short time (necessitating frequent network calls), not that the logs were retained for only a short time, which I agree is a bad defense.

Thanks for the clarification. I confused the cert cache with the apple server logs.

Re: Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats

#336

Post by 015a »

wheybags wrote: post #258
015a wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminiscent to me of Call of Duty Warzone; it has loadouts which you can give custom names (that only you see!) which are protected with a profanity filter. Comically, some of the literal names of the guns are banned as being profane, like "MP5".

Maybe I'm being dense here, but what possible profane meaning is there in MP5?

You're not being dense. Its inexplicable. The only thing I can come up with is that "5" looks like "S", so maybe its banning "MPS", but even that is nearly meaningless; urbandictionary has some explicit things it stands for, though they're not well-upvoted.

Re: Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats

#337

Post by boring_twenties »

siltpotato wrote: post #102
boring_twenties wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not super relevant or anything but I just can't help but share my favorite profanity filter story, so here you go. I worked at a place that had a profanity filter in two parts. The first part was in C, several pages of if (!strcmp(x, a)) return 0; After all that, it then invokes popen() to ssh to another machine and run a shell script there, which contains several more pages of string comparisons, this time in shell.

Hold on, what? Okay, return false if they aren't equal, then open another process to repeat this method once again in the shell... I can't guess the reason. Would you know if there is any reason this might have been done?

I wouldn't know the real reason for sure, but this seems plausible:

1) They got tired of having to modify C code and wait for the deploy cycle to modify the filter

2) Using, for example, the database would be more work than calling a shell script. On top of that, it might actually be beyond the abilities of the programmer involved.

3) The C code executes on an arbitrary machine. Hence the ssh to a specific machine, so that the shell script would only have to be maintained in one place

Re: Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats

#338

Post by ffhhj »

duskwuff wrote: post #288
ffhhj wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google uses blacklists of words to demonetize Youtube channels. They have similar blacklists to ban Play apps. I found it the hard way when they removed my video recording app after I simply added "spy cam" in the list of features. Lesson of life learned, so I implemented ways to keep in contact with my users in case of sudden ban and ask them to move to a new app or another channel.

That's explicitly a violation of Google's Play Store Policies: > Apps must not present themselves as a spying or secret surveillance solution. If your application could be accurately described as a "spy cam", it's likely that you were already in violation of their stalkerware policies.

That's correct, but my app didn't have any specific feature that makes it a "spy cam", it's just a funny feature, indeed you can use any video recording app as a "spy cam". So according to Google the difference between one and the other is mentioning those words. That shows how their automatic ban system works.

Re: Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats

#339

Post by smaryjerry »

elihu wrote: post #293
horsawlarway wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good - There's a clear theme in the motivations of both major mobile OS companies here: You, a 3rd party developer making custom software products for a mobile platform, are no longer allowed to have customers yourself. Instead you must grovel and beg and pray that our lords Apple/Google consent to allow you to rent their customers. This consent can be revoked at any time, you will pay through the nose for it (20%+ o…

What's currently stopping some third party from creating a fork of Android with a better store? Are there closed-source parts of Android that can't be easily replicated? Is it the difficulty of getting any major phone manufacturers to agree to install it? Or something else or all of the above?

Amazon tried and even with giving away hundreds of dollars in free apps every year they still failed. People just don’t want to use an alternative that has warnings of security holes.

Re: Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats

#340

Post by SilasX »

saurik wrote: post #294
SilasX wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate the further context, but am not sure that it was necessary to mock my phrasing.

(I wrote a giant response to this explaining why I was frustrated and who I was frustrated with and how it meant we were just screwed as a society, but I have decided to just suffice it to note that I am not mocking your phrasing--that is the correct phrasing for the demoralizing thought--and that, FWIW, I don't think iOS does this in the same way, even for the "enterprise"-signed software where one would expect it w…

Ah okay, sorry for overreacting.
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