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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

I want the opposite: subtitles on everything, just not directly on the picture.

Opera houses have subtitles on a separate text-only screen (or screens embedded in seats). Why can’t I have a device like that at home?

A narrow subtitle display that sits below the TV, sort of like the Touch Bar on the previous-generation MacBooks. I’d buy that.

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There's this: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.aud...

You can install it on your phone and it'll subtitle your life if you can find a good place to put it down. It's meant for the deaf and hard of hearing (hence features like visual alarms) but in my experience it'll transcribe stuff that's being said pretty well as long as the mic catches the audio you want to hear. Perhaps it would be even better with a quality (bluetooth? 3.5mm?) external microphone.

Well now you've got me thinking. That has to be very feasible for any content you own the file for, but I wonder how steaming services currently handle subtitles. Are they embedded into the video stream or are they their own channel? Could a third party pull them out and pass them along to a separate device like that?

Does anyone with more experience have any idea?

Definitely not embedded into the video stream, at least for Netflix or Youtube. There's actually extensions that take the subtitles and manipulate them (even put them outside of the video stream) so you can use them for various language-learning purposes. Look at stuff like Language Reactor (https://www.languagereactor.com/), previously Language Learning with Netflix. There's specific browser extensions like subs2srs and yomichan (https://animecards.site/yomichansetup/) which are very common in Japanese language learning communities for people to use on subtitle lines to get direct translation/dictionary entries of certain words and be able to send them directly to Anki (SRS flashcard software).

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