Comment by gcb0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gcb0 | Hacker News Reader

unfortunately mubi, Netflix, etc have really bad quality. Netflix is ahead, obviously. specially in sound. buy any fast horizontal pan scene and compression ruins everything.

mubi sometimes has sound so badly compressed i just give up watching.

also, accessibility and original sound. Netflix decides if you're going to be able to hear the original language or not. some movies have all tracks, some have only the one in the language of whichever country you're at the time. some have subtitles in the local county language. some have deaf cc subtitles. mubi has zero regard for the deaf. Netflix has zero regards for the deaf overseas, in the US it's pretty good though.

bottom line is, all the talks that Netflix et al are the answer to piracy are wrong if the user is minimally self respecting. i will stop writing now because typing on mobile in this tiny box is also bad for self respecting me.

> Netflix has zero regards for the deaf overseas, in the US it's pretty good though.

Sure, because the National Association for the Deaf sued them to get them to do it. [0] It's an important case for online businesses because the judge concluded that the ADA applies to them, too (which is sort of on obvious conclusion but it hadn't be tested in court).

Captions already existed for the large majority of TV shows and movies Netflix was licensing, they just needed to get them from the studios though may have needed to be recreated if they weren't saved in text form, DVD and Blu-ray captions are stored as images on the discs. Of course for their original programming they would need to have them created, for a ballpark figure of $2/minute of content.

Outside the U.S., I assume it depends on what captions already exist and what local laws require.

[0] https://nad.org/news/2012/6/landmark-precedent-nad-vs-netfli...

I was assuming film geek is someone that likes unconventional, non-mainstream films rather than an videophile. I'm not disagreeing with the rest of your post, but as a self-identified film geek audio/video quality is low on my list of priorities when watching a film (as long as it's at least DVD quality of course.)

I live in Japan and half of the Netflix content is inaccessible because for some reason they don't have English subtitles for Japanese movies. Does anyone know if this has to do with licencing? Does it cost Netflix more to add subtitles?

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