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Captions are broken everywhere, on streaming services but also blu-ray. The whole system seems incredibly poorly thought out. Basically, you only get to chose
by Aaargh20318 4y ago
Captions are broken everywhere, on streaming services but also blu-ray. The whole system seems incredibly poorly thought out.
Basically, you only get to chose two settings: captions on/off, and caption language.
Now, personally I think captions are very distracting and I prefer them off. However, some content is not completely in a language I can understand, so those parts need captions.
For example: I was watching a movie the other day where 99% of the movie was in English. However, there were a few short scenes where some characters spoke in Chinese. Since I can’t understand Chinese I had to stop the movie, rewind a bit, enable captions, re-watch the scene and then disable captions again. This happened several times during the movie.
It seems to me that the system could have been so much better with a tiny bit more metadata and some additional settings.
Simply let me select the following:
- Languages that I can understand when spoken.
- Caption language for parts that are not in one of the languages I can understand.
The only thing that is needed to implement this is to add a ‘source’ language tag to each captioned line. If the source language is one of those understood by the viewer then don’t display the caption.
- fragmede 4y agoParamount Plus' web player lets you change the Font size/type/weight/color and background color, to my surprise.
- U1F984 4y agoThat's what "forced captions" are for: they will only show subtitles for the scenes where foreign languages are spoken.
- Aaargh20318 4y agoEnglish is a foreign language to me, but I don’t need subtitles for that. I also don’t need subtitles for Dutch or German. I also don’t want Dutch subtitles (my native language) in an otherwise English movie. So basically: give me English subtitles, but not for anything spoken in English, Dutch or German.
- michaelt 4y ago> However, there were a few short scenes where some characters spoke in Chinese. Since I can’t understand Chinese I had to stop the movie, rewind a bit, enable captions, re-watch the scene and then disable captions again. When I was young (in the days of VHS) you got hard subs if James Bond's Russian enemy was saying something plot-important in Russian, and no subs if it was just flavour, or obvious from the context (hello, yes sir, raise the alarm, take the prisoner to the cells etc) I don't think most filmmakers expect you to rewind and enable subtitles.