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Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

daiz.moe

71–80 of 171 posts

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#71
post #63

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…

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.

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#72

Sort of unrelated, but has anyone else noticed that there are a lot of subtitling errors in netflix shows recently? Two I noticed yesterday: "natural world" -> "national world" "cede power" -> "seed power" I guess they're just machine transcribing it without oversight now?

Yes. Even in their kinda flagship title right now, A House of Dynamite:

[14:08] "I'm told high, Jerry." -> "I'm told… Hi, Jerry." (in response to being asked "What's your level of confidence on that?")

I always wonder why they don't have a way to upload the shooting script as a starting point so they could then make changes from there.

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People that are into anime are into anime because it is special. JoJo's Bizzare Adventure is cool when Marvel movies aren't because JoJo was made by one mangaka and a Marvel movie is made by a committee of committees.

[deleted]

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#74
post #48

Netflix implements "imgsub"[1] - it actually delivers a zipped archive of transparent images to the player. So technically they can pre-render positioned typesetted subtitles on server and render them as images overlay, as long as there's no animated text effects. In general, streaming services have to ensure maximum compatibility when playing their contents on all kinds of devices - high end and low end. For which o…

> on low end device it could be very resource constraining to render typesetted subtitles.

So render them only on high end devices? Computers allow making dynamic choices.

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#75
post #20

Earlier 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…

Well the subtitles are ASS, alright, I'll give em that!

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#76

Sort of unrelated, but has anyone else noticed that there are a lot of subtitling errors in netflix shows recently? Two I noticed yesterday: "natural world" -> "national world" "cede power" -> "seed power" I guess they're just machine transcribing it without oversight now?

Welcome to the future! Do you feel disrupted yet?

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#77
post #48

Netflix implements "imgsub"[1] - it actually delivers a zipped archive of transparent images to the player. So technically they can pre-render positioned typesetted subtitles on server and render them as images overlay, as long as there's no animated text effects. In general, streaming services have to ensure maximum compatibility when playing their contents on all kinds of devices - high end and low end. For which o…

> In general, streaming services have to ensure maximum compatibility when playing their contents on all kinds of devices - high end and low end. For which on low end device it could be very resource constraining to render typesetted subtitles. There are other platforms where all video playback have to be managed by the platform system frameworks with limited format support, and streaming services can't do much about…

I wouldn't bet that every smart TV Crunchyroll wants to be available on has more processing power than your phone from 2015 (some of those TVs might be older than that), but yes, it's probably less about hardware capabilities than about platform limitations that make the usual solution of compiling libass into a blob and integrating it into the player not so easy to implement.

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#78
post #63

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…

"...I find it beyond lazy and insulting." Using the words "lazy" and "insulting" in this way sounds rude, insulting, entitled and arrogant.

They are very negative words and it is rude to use them when referring to someone else's work or things similar to that work.

TFA is certainly not lazy (and it's very obvious to an NT that a LOT of effort went into it).

We should ideally all be producing content in an accessible way when possible. But doing so is difficult and is a learned skill set.

Making things accessible to NDs can be difficult because normal written English heavily utilizes things that NDs can be unable to intuitively process.

There is also often a trade-off involved in making work accessible. Aesthetically specifically, artistically generally, or in terms of brevity or convenience to others.

Your inability to read the context clues and process the visual information is your inability to do something. A thing that the vast majority of people can do. TFA clearly wasn't intended as insulting and your interpretation of it as insulting is unfortunate.

Your very specific needs are not the needs of the vast majority of people who are reading it. If you cannot see the difference in subtitles between the two sets of examples and tell that one is bad, then you are not the main target audience.

The new generation of subtitles are bland and poorly integrated with the context.

Previous subtitles were attractive and well integrated, with colours, typefaces, orientations and locations picked to best suit the content. Everything (including background signs) are translated with attention paid to details.

The article uses a lot of visual examples to explain this. It is written in a way that is intuitive and easy to digest for most people. I can literally skim this and understand it.

If you wished to write your comment in a way that wasn't rude to the OP, you could provide the same important information without using negative language:

"I am autistic and don't watch anime. I've read the first few paragraphs and I'm finding it overwhelming and overstimulating to precisely identify the problem.

What is the exact issue? The subtitle's location on the screen? Contrast or font? Quality of translations?"

Relevant parts of TFA that explain are:

>...translations for dialogue and on-screen text aren’t even separated to different sides of the screen – everything is just bunched up together at either the top or the bottom. Lots of on-screen text is even left straight up untranslated.

>The amount of it varies from series to series, but almost every anime out there makes use of on-screen text at one point or another, with some featuring downright ridiculous amounts of signs (what on-screen text is called for short). With all this on-screen text, it is also very common for there to be text visible on the screen potentially in multiple positions, even when characters are speaking.

>At bare minimum, when subtitling anime, you should be able to do overlaps (multiple lines of text on the screen at the same time) and positioning (the ability to freely place subtitles anywhere on the screen).

>Overlaps and positioning are really just the bare necessities for dealing with on-screen text in anime though – ideally, you should also be able to use different fonts, colors, animate text in various ways, etc. Making use of all these possibilities is an art unto itself, and this art of on-screen text localization is commonly referred to as typesetting. Typesetting is important even when dubbing anime, as all that on-screen text is going to be there in the video all the same!

>[Crunchyroll started] mangling subtitles with typesetting into something compatible with the awful subtitling standards of the general streaming services [Netflix and Amazon Prime].

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#79
post #63

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…

My understanding is, people who only get subtitles from anime have very particular subtitle preferences.

As someone who grew up where 90% of TV was subtitled I find the “bad” anime subtitles much better.

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#80
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They could borrow a trick from Netflix mentioned elsewhere in this thread: https://netflixsubs.app/docs/netflix/features/imgsub I’m pretty sure it’s not too hard to implement an ASS → PNG renderer (especially considering vibe coding is now a thing). Then, just need to split out subs that can be actual text somehow from the ones that have to be overlays. Apart from that... surely they could at least keep ASS subs for…

ASS can have frame-by-frame animation IIRC, so a stream of PNGs could end up being quite high bitrate with high complexity files
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