The other problem with burned-in subtitles is you can't change the language.

The other other problem with burned-in subtitles is that they normally have horrible formatting. Who wants to try to read single words that only flash on-screen while they are being spoken?

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rkomorn a day ago | parent | prev [-]

True, but (as someone who not infrequently has to rewind content on just about all streaming apps because it decided one particular subtitle only needed to be display for less than 200ms this time around) sometimes burned-in seems like a good idea.

I don't understand why the problem seems so pervasive (I've seen it on Netflix, Viki, and Apple TV, at least) and so transient.

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t-3 19 hours ago | parent [-]

It's a newer problem IME, so I'd guess it's cause by people using auto-transcription/translation tools to generate subtitles. For eg. Chinese content, I'll see stuff on Viki where the OG Mandarin subs are formatted sanely and the English is piecemeal follow-the-audio style. I can't imagine this happening in any other way than use of a transcription+translation tool without review.

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rkomorn 17 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think it's an automation-related thing. It happens even on big name shows on big apps.

I think it's a toolkit thing where some sort of event or timer goes off at the wrong time and the subtitles get cleared when they shouldn't. And then if you rewind and replay, it doesn't happen again (because spurious event/timer issue).

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t-3 17 hours ago | parent [-]

At least with vtt and srt, the chunk of text displayed is explicitly associated with a chunk of time, so something like that really shouldn't be happening. Maybe there is some sort of subtitle-writing on the fly like what is sometimes done with transcoding video, but that would be really strange for a plaintext format that is so light compared to the video and audio coming with it.

	▲	rkomorn 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> so something like that really shouldn't be happening I don't disagree, yet here we are. It's got race condition vibes. I don't know if it's related to the TV OS (LG WebOS in our case) but I guess that would be the common factor since it happens across multiple apps and languages. Anyway, it's quirky and occasionally annoying, but that's about it. :)