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Relatedly, does anyone know why subtitles are displayed over the video itself, as opposed to in the black rectangle that often exists below? I can see that it might be a little harder to look down to the text, but it would be much easier to have sufficient contrast against a black background. I wish this were at least an option!

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I believe that DVD subtitles are just dumb bitmaps overlaid onto the video. You'd have to have logic to slice up the bitmap and relocate it off-screen.

Closed caption is textual stream with metadata (x/y position). That would be a cinch to play in an off-screen area.

The black rectangles exist because the video is a different aspect ratio than your monitor. Not all displays have the same ratio, a monitor with a matching ratio will have no black bars on any side. So by nature, closed captioning has to be within the video bounds.

I'm aware of the reason for the black bars. The point is that the captions that are not part of the video stream (I believe on DVDs they are not) can be presented below the video if that space exists and the user desires.

That feature is called "subtitle shift", some DVD/BD players have it (and VLC IIRC). Unfortunately streaming clients generally don’t.

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