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Comment by mvhvv | Hacker News Reader

I personally prefer to watch most things with subtitles. I'm usually extremely conscious of how much noise I'm making in the house, and I rarely ever want to watch something at cinema volumes. Good quality subtitles rarely ever feel intrusive, but I really wish there was a better distinction between subtitling and closed-captioning.

Most modern streaming platforms seem to only offer one accessibility-focused option that combines both, and I find it hugely irritating to see text on-screen like "[SOMBRE MUSIC PLAYS]" or "[CROWD MURMURING]".

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Oh man, I could not agree more about the audio description subtitles. It was particularly annoying when I was watching Cabinet of Curiosities. Something about having the musical cues and weird sound effects described in text on the screen completely takes their effectiveness away. Instead of subtly increasing the tension of a spooky scene with a gentle crescendo or something it's all [DISCORDANT MUSICAL NOTE PLAYS] or [SUBTLE SQUELCHING SOUND] or [HAUNTING VOICES SING]. It's like the horror equivalent of holding up a "CROWD LAUGHS" sign or something.

I get why the accessibility version is nice, but I just want dialogue - I do not need the show's sound described and it actively works against the show.

And it is fun when the movie has some foreign language dialogue with subtitles but the subtitles are covered by “[SPEAKS MANDARIN]”.

Even better when it says "[SPEAKS FOREIGN LANGUAGE]"

I've always taken that as the characters not knowing which language is being spoken. If it's been established I expect to see [SPEAKING MANDARIN] or some such.

They don't subtitle it because the audience isn't expected to know what's being said.

But when it's subtitled in the movie itself (which is then covered by the TV's closed-captioning system), the audience is clearly expected to get to know what's being said.

I love those additional details and always watch with subtitles. Often enough the subtitles provide additional information about something left otherwise ambiguous or undefined. Names of characters are a common one, but in horror/mystery you can narrow down the plot or supernatural mechanics.

I don't remember specific moments from Cabinet of Curiosities but 1899 definitely had some subtitle details that narrowed the plot possibilities.

Stranger Things exploited this to good effect, though, with descriptive captions like "tentacles wetly squelching" and the like. See https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/stranger-things-seaso....

I also watch most things with subs but I find it frequently leads to a worse experience. I end up reading things too early (e.g. a punchline) for one.

I've noticed this too, it's not as annoying as the audio description thing, but definitely takes the wind out of a joke at times to have it spelled out on screen before it's delivered. It would be cool if the people making the subtitles could be a little more artful about it, and maybe introduce a slight delay for the punchline of jokes and big reveals.

Interestingly this isn't a problem for me. I usually watch with subtitles because I 'hear" better with them on, but I'm not consciously reading them. I assume some part of my brain is cross referencing what I hear with the words on the screen as I hear it.

My girlfriend however has a tendency to laugh or react to a line before it's delivered which is REALLY annoying.

> I also watch most things with subs but I find it frequently leads to a worse experience. I end up reading things too early (e.g. a punchline) for one.

I find it frees up the mind. A quick glance at subtitles then your mind is free to analyze other details of the scene. Soundtrack, lighting, mannerisms, costumes, background objects, etc..

I agree it's pretty bad for comedy though.

Whatever subset of ADD I have makes that impossible. I am physically compelled to pay attention to pretty much only the subtitles.

I have no ADD whatsoever, but similarly find it difficult not to focus entirely on subtitles to the exclusion of all else.

I'd rather have close captioning than nothing at all.

There's many Amazon Prime movies I've quit because of a sentence I could not hear very well and they didn't come with close captioning. I hate that so much these days.

My pirate setup at least comes with auto-synced subs for everything I watch.

How do you auto sync the subtitles?

I use https://github.com/morpheus65535/bazarr which comes with https://github.com/smacke/ffsubsync.

Is there a way to merge two sub files?

Yeah there's tools that can do it, it's really not too difficult technically because the subtitle format that's most popular is crazy simple.

I've used https://subtitletools.com/merge-subtitles-online before. There's command-line ones, but I can't remember which I've used.

Thanks!

> I find it hugely irritating to see text on-screen like "[SOMBRE MUSIC PLAYS]" or "[CROWD MURMURING]"

It's even more frustrating to know you could get rid of that easily with a simple regexp. There are way too many things that could be great with an extra line of code if only they were programmable.

Yet another way that pirated content is superior. You can edit subtitles quite easily in most formats, and the common format of subtitles is pretty trivial to parse.

Being Dutch, it's most things be default show Dutch subtitles and I'm used to them. Watching Cyberpunk: Edgerunners on Netflix, however, I had to turn them off. They were too distracting, and the content of the subtitles was just too different from what I heard. I forgot if I switched to English closed captions or just turned them off entirely. I'd never before had subtitles be that distracting.

Frequently, though, subtitles reveal sounds that are impossible to hear from the sound. There might be some inaudible background muttering that I don't even know it's there, but the subtitles tell me what it is, and I'm left wondering where it comes from. Do people watching without subtitles just miss that stuff? Are we supposed to watch everything with high quality headphones to pick up these details?

I'm not fluent in Japanese but I know enough to be super distracted and annoyed by the English subtitles. I haven't played the game so maybe I'm missing out on the invented slang but it's jarring when they say the English word "install" in Japanese (insutooru) but then the subtitles read "chromed".

"chrome" is cyberpunk slang for body mods. I assume they meant they'd some body mod installed.

These slang terms aren't specific for that franchise either, they are common in all things cyberpunk.

The slang is English / Western language specific really. Words like choom, nova, and preem only make sense in a multicultural setting like American English. Don’t really remember Japanese equivalents to these terms from either the anime or the game, and the Korean absolutely does not have the extra slang either which takes a lot away from the experience IMO. It’s not like Japanese and Korean speakers are incapable of figuring out made up words so it’s a very conscious, deliberate difference to me. I did notice that German dialogue in the game did include some of the English slang which makes this more puzzling for myself. I’d bet that the Polish dialogue includes the in-world slang or even makes its own slang but I’m not familiar enough with Polish to understand when / if that happens in the dialogue.

FWIW I've gotten hooked on using headphones, even when I'm watching something on my TV. Even cheap BT headphones will give clearer dialog than a TV's crappy built-in speaker, without having to worry about making the walls vibrate.

I spent serious money on a sound bar a while back. I used it twice, sent it back, and I've been using the BT headphones ever since. One of these days, I'm going to have company over and I won't know what to do. Make the walls vibrate, I guess.

The LG C1 TV (and possibly any LG TV?) has a "Clear Voice" sound mode which make watching things using the TV speakers much better.

I wish I could use subtitles (especially on shows with a heavy accent...Peripheral was a pain sometimes) but I catch myself focussing on them too much and missing visual content. I tend to watch them even when I don't need them. It's quite annoying.

You'd think removing any lines that are [*] would be easy, it's weird there's no option to do so in the players.

On that note, I've noticed that the subtitles at Netflix and Amazon Prime for German dubs are almost always wrong. Like, they're often so bad that the words are completely different and they say something completely different with a different meaning from what's in the dub. What's up with that?

"[Chittering]" is my irritation.

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