Hacker News Reader

Comment by hcurtiss | Hacker News Reader

With apologies for the diversion, may I ask why you like subtitles? I have a neighbor who watches every movie with subtitles. I've never understood it. When I ask him, it's usually something about seeing the words, but he's not hard of hearing, and they listen to their movies outrageously loud anyway. In any event, to me, it detracts from the cinematography, and absent some handicap, I can't understand why you'd want subtitles. But I'm fully aware there's a sizable contingent that prefers watching movies with subtitles. Why is that?

View on HN

I'm mildly hard of hearing and the poor audio mixes in movies and shows are very difficult for me. For example with House of the Dragon, there is no volume where I can understand all the words in quiet conversations without blowing my ears out in battle scenes. Fiddling with the volume constantly is annoying. I've looked for dynamic volume features, but my TV doesn't have them and I'm not interested in a new TV or sound system.

So it's subtitles — especially for shows with poor audio mixes, where people whisper, talk quietly, or with heavy accents.

I don't know what's going on with that, it's gotten so bad these past few years. I'm not hard of hearing but there are regularly shows where I can't hear the dialog at all because of the mix. Some recent ones that come to mind were Tenet and the Invincible tv-show.

> Some recent ones that come to mind were Tenet and the Invincible tv-show.

It is a known issue: [1]

> Every time a new Christopher Nolan movie comes out [...] one complaint which seems almost universal at this point is that the sound mixing in many of his movies has resulted in dialogue that is frequently muffled and sometimes even downright inaudible.

[1] https://www.slashfilm.com/577777/christopher-nolan-sound-mix...

I've just got a 7.1 system and suddenly I don't need subtitles nearly as much. I suspect that's the main issue - mixes are done for multi-channel, and if you have fewer channels they get mashed together. Because music, sound effects and background noise come out of multiple channels, and voice tends to come out of the central channel only, it gets lost in the mix.

> With apologies for the diversion, may I ask why you like subtitles?

Because I like to watch movies in languages I do not understand.

Obviously needed in that scenario. That doesn't explain my neighbor, the Marvel Universe fan, but maybe he's an anomaly. I just had the sense there were a bunch of people out there like him who watched movies with subtitles as a matter of course.

I always have subtitles on, It helps me focus/some movies like garbling their audio a bit too much for my taste

I use subtitles in everything I watch, especially new movies, because they seem to lower the dialogue so much and explosions are so loud. It helps me keep the volume at a decent overall level and I won't miss anything.

I don’t need them for old films (pre 1990), but it makes it so much easier to tell what’s being said in newer ones. Clear enunciation gave way to stylistic accents after that - also, the sound is mixed with way too much range (works okay if you have cinema grade sound).

I've heard from some autistic people that it helps them in some way when watching.

I put on subtitles so I don't need to constantly adjust volume based on whether it is an action scene or a quiet conversation.

But, I agree they are overall distracting - even when I can hear a conversation perfectly, I still find myself staring at the subtitles.

Sometimes we keep the volume low because the baby is sleeping. Sometimes we enjoy talking over movies, and subtitles can help us not miss things.

But the biggest reason is that house acoustics suck. Sitting in a drywall box is not the best thing for intelligibility or sonic appreciation. I used to operate a small music studio out of a house, and I spent more than a trivial amount of money to make the acoustics decent for such work. I daydream about doing similar treatments in my living room, but I don't make my living doing audio work anymore, so it's hard to justify the time and expense. So I turn on subtitles or put on headphones.

Because, even though I'm a native English speaker, I can't fckn understand half of what people are saying either because of ascents, other noise, not understanding context, and generally having a hard time correctly decoding speech unless it's the only thing happening. Maybe it's a symptom of some sort of non-neuro-typical trait.

Also, I've always had a tendancy to hear egg corns where most people hear the correct words.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn

Plenty of people watch movies in languages that they don't speak. Probably half the movies I see are foreign. Subtitles are obviously necessary in this case, and even if watching foreign films weren't extremely common, working subtitle support would be crucial for accessibility reasons.

I grew up watching many movies in multiple languages I only partially understood (my mother tongues so to speak) and, as I grew older, other languages I don't understand at all. The habit of using subtitles kind of stuck. Plus a lot of English language media I see these days have is increasingly various accents in them. For example, I consume a decent amount of British shows where some accents can be tough to understand as someone unfamiliar with them. Even some American accents can be tough decipher for my Canadian ears.

Honestly, I think after some point I have gotten so used to them that they drift in the background and don't distract the way you may feel.

That being said, I understand where you are coming from, I am quite particular about the style of subtitles. I would like them to be white, proportional font, transparent background and black drop shadow/outline. Most other styles I find distracting but that may be because I am used to this particular style. For example I don't like Youtube's default translucent background for the subtitles.

My hearing is mostly OK though a little spotty especially when tired or otherwise not entirely paying attention. Some sound mixes make it quite hard to clearly make out voices in some situations, so I occasionally need subs for that. Also I sometimes watch TV while on the treadmill. Sometimes I prefer subtitles to headphones, especially with the noisy old treadmill I've got at home.

I also have some friends for whom English is a second or third language, despite being very good with the language generally they sometimes have trouble, for instance with strong accents or bad sound mixes, so find subtitles (in English) useful.

Not every video is mixed well, and audio compression makes dialogue difficult for me to parse. I have the same difficulty on the phone, too, because of the speech compression.

I used to watch movies on my laptop, and I've not needed subtitles after getting comfortable with English. But now I have a proper speaker setup (stereo though) and the fact is that the mixing can be horrendous. Someone is talking normally and then – BRA-AH - some audio effects or shooting happens, and you miss part of the conversation. And some accents are just about unintelligible for me. So, I just add subtitles when I want to follow the conversation.

It doesn't take any noticeable effort or attention for me to read the subtitles. I've done it for simply so long.

In my case I just can't understand what the people onscreen are saying most of the time, even if I crank the volume up.

If I wear closed over ear headphones and watch something on my PC then it's fine, because I can hear quiet sounds much better that way.

Subtitles, in addition to letting me watch content in many languages I don't speak, liberates me from poor audiomixing decisions, which seem to be getting ever more common.

> With apologies for the diversion, may I ask why you like subtitles? I have a neighbor who watches every movie with subtitles. I've never understood it.

Not that it will help, but I have three kids and they ALL do this. I have no idea why they do it, none of them have any issues with their hearing so it makes zero sense.

Personally i find it both annoying and frustrating. I can hear just fine, and having the words on the screen is distracting but they refuse to watch TV without them on?

Lots of shows these days have awful audio mixing, going from extremely quiet to extremely loud, and mumbling actors. I use subtitles for these. I don't even notice them on, but if I miss a word I can glance down and see it

I like watching TV quietly, so others are not disturbed. Also, I absorb information better when I read it. Both reasons why I like subtitles, and I suspect many others do as well. I have no issues with my hearing. I don't like large subtitles, either, but if I can set them to be small, they don't bother me.

They do it when we watch tv as a family, so it isn't that the noise disturbs others.

The show starts playing, they demand the subtitles be turned on...

I dont think watching "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" requires the subtitles so they can absorb information ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32879737

Thanks for this. At least I know I’m not alone in asking!

I use subtitles so I can watch at 1.75 speed

I'm Deaf (90-100db loss) and while I can hear most things with hearing aids on... I can't make out the dialogue. I think I would miss about 80% of what's being said without the assistance of subtitles/captions.

Trying to understand the plot in Nolan's movies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com