Captions are broken everywhere, on streaming services but also blu-ray. The whole system seems incredibly poorly thought out.

Basically, you only get to chose two settings: captions on/off, and caption language.

Now, personally I think captions are very distracting and I prefer them off. However, some content is not completely in a language I can understand, so those parts need captions.

For example: I was watching a movie the other day where 99% of the movie was in English. However, there were a few short scenes where some characters spoke in Chinese. Since I can’t understand Chinese I had to stop the movie, rewind a bit, enable captions, re-watch the scene and then disable captions again. This happened several times during the movie.

It seems to me that the system could have been so much better with a tiny bit more metadata and some additional settings.

Simply let me select the following:

- Languages that I can understand when spoken.

- Caption language for parts that are not in one of the languages I can understand.

The only thing that is needed to implement this is to add a ‘source’ language tag to each captioned line. If the source language is one of those understood by the viewer then don’t display the caption.