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Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

daiz.moe

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Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#91

Post by dodos »

mamonoleechi wrote: post #88
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…

I was pretty happy with all the animes produced by Netflix I watched ; they had a good choice of both audio and subs

Netflix is fine so long as you don't live in Japan (I wonder how other countries are). They only give Japanese subtitles for most anime here. Netflix produced anime do have a great breadth of options for subtitles and audio though.

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#92

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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!

> that have tanked the service's first-party presentation quality to an all-time low

Would you pirate for better subtitles? Assuming Crunchroll has the legal rights to the content pinned down, that may be the only way to apply legitimate pressure.

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#93

Post by birksherty »

dylan604 wrote: post #36
khamidou wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is just an excuse. There needs to be a hard english sub and then keep other languages can be single video with different text file. Deleting 80% good things only to keep other 20% happy should not be an excuse.

Only english is the most popular and just keep it. Most of the good hard subs are made for english and that is what people want.

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#94

Post by lazystar »

amarant wrote: post #75
Daiz wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

who in the world thought that a .ass file extension would be a good idea, sigh.

https://fileformats.fandom.com/wiki/SubStation_Alpha

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#95

Post by virtue3 »

khamidou wrote: post #29
virtue3 wrote: post #25

Earlier 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?)

Guess how well supported soft subs are on smartTVs etc? :)

It's really tough when you need to scale these things across 20 platforms.

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#96

Post by jahsome »

Daiz wrote: post #71
jahsome wrote: 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.

The article says there's a nosedive. But by what standard(s)? See the questions I already posted in my original response.

Both the "good" and "bad" quality examples contain subtitles with no discernible difference. All examples contain legible subtitles. So where's the "nosedive"?

There's clearly some anime-specific context and nuance that is NOT communicated with context-less screencaps.

Perhaps the article wasn't written for someone unfamiliar with anime, and I'm not meant to understand, but it would be helpful to have the difference explained. Not to mention the improved accessibility for screen readers or folks with sensory processing issues like myself. At a minimum, marking up the image would be helpful. Circle things. Arrows. Help me understand, don't drop me into unfamiliar territory and leave me to guess.

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#97

Post by jahsome »

Nexxxeh wrote: post #78
jahsome wrote: 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…

Seems like you were so quick to jump to the defense of the author (who likely doesn't need your white knighting) you completely misunderstood or are misrepresenting what I said was lazy and insulting which was the hypothetical coworker example, and NOT the article itself.

With that in mind, I don't have the energy to read the rest of your reply. I appreciate you taking the time to respond, and I'm sorry if my phrasing wasn't clear. I'm sure it's a great article, and I meant in no way to insult the author.

I'm just not equipped to gather much meaning from it the way the information is presented.

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#98

Post by virtue3 »

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #50
dylan604 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The article claims that you can slice up the video and only use language-specific hardsubs for parts that need it. I'd be interested if there are technical reasons that can't be done.

Technically it's possible.

We did do inlaid server-side ads that way for a while.

IT just takes an excessive amount of work.

The real solution is just the full support of ASS/TTML/VTT subtitles on all platforms. Usually smart devices are kind of only partially supported.

For instance - casting to a chromecast fallsback to SRT.

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#99

Post by jahsome »

aoeusnth1 wrote: post #87
jahsome wrote: 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 think the before and after screenshots are pretty stark.

In what way? They both have subtitles. The issue with "quality" is not clear to at least me, and I'm guessing that's because I don't watch crunchyroll or much anime.

Re: Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles

#100

Post by huflungdung »

piperswe wrote: post #80
notpushkin wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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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