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Comment by Lio | Hacker News Reader

Once local transcription is in more places hopefully we can persuade content creator not to burn bouncing sub-titles into their videos.

I've seen professionally produced recordings on dry and technical subjects with good sound quality where they've decided to use distracting sub-titles with no way to disable them.

It seems so unnecessary if you're not making novelty videos about cats.

Also local transcription allows for automatic translation and again overlaying subtitles on top of an existing burnt in set is a really poor reading experience.

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They do that because it increases “engagement”, not because they care about the user’s experience with the subtitles.

Also some social media platforms don't offer subtitle functionality, so burned-in is the only way if you want to serve your content to people that require subtitles or refuse to unmute their phones while they watch from their toilet.

I did that (distracting subtitles) on one of my videos and it had a very negative response. I won't do it again, but I was puzzled because I find it much nicer than the traditional subtitle format personally. It's easier for my brain to focus on. (And no one in my test audience minded.)

Do you happen to have ADHD? That might explain the discrepancy :)

Subtitles are very explicitly not something you're meant to engage with or focus on which is why people hate it when you make the subtitles more "engaging" than the content of the video. If you want people to focus on your subtitles, you should write a blog instead of make a video.

Subtitles are an accessibility feature. They are meant to stay out of the way and add to, not detract from the video content. They are meant to be subtle and only visible if you need to look at them.

Those burned in subtitles still aren’t as cool as theme-matched anime subtitles during intro music sequences from fansubs 15 years ago.

Those are still cool IMO

Or how the fansubbers will create masks to translate diegetic text like signage and written notes

also love when a fansubber will just outright give you an asterisk explaining a joke that relies on nuance or wordplay

I recently discovered that the Internet Archive has the Tomodachi fansubs of Fushigi Yugi which, at least in my experience, were the most famous example of that technique.

https://archive.org/details/tomodachi-fushigi-yugi-vhsrip

Algorithm boosts it that’s why they do it. Even if every device had real time 100% accurate subtitling built in they’d still do it if they video performs better with it.

The other problem with burned-in subtitles is you can't change the language.

True, but (as someone who not infrequently has to rewind content on just about all streaming apps because it decided one particular subtitle only needed to be display for less than 200ms this time around) sometimes burned-in seems like a good idea.

I don't understand why the problem seems so pervasive (I've seen it on Netflix, Viki, and Apple TV, at least) and so transient.

It's a newer problem IME, so I'd guess it's cause by people using auto-transcription/translation tools to generate subtitles. For eg. Chinese content, I'll see stuff on Viki where the OG Mandarin subs are formatted sanely and the English is piecemeal follow-the-audio style. I can't imagine this happening in any other way than use of a transcription+translation tool without review.

I don't think it's an automation-related thing. It happens even on big name shows on big apps.

I think it's a toolkit thing where some sort of event or timer goes off at the wrong time and the subtitles get cleared when they shouldn't. And then if you rewind and replay, it doesn't happen again (because spurious event/timer issue).

At least with vtt and srt, the chunk of text displayed is explicitly associated with a chunk of time, so something like that really shouldn't be happening. Maybe there is some sort of subtitle-writing on the fly like what is sometimes done with transcoding video, but that would be really strange for a plaintext format that is so light compared to the video and audio coming with it.

> so something like that really shouldn't be happening

I don't disagree, yet here we are. It's got race condition vibes.

I don't know if it's related to the TV OS (LG WebOS in our case) but I guess that would be the common factor since it happens across multiple apps and languages.

Anyway, it's quirky and occasionally annoying, but that's about it. :)

The other other problem with burned-in subtitles is that they normally have horrible formatting. Who wants to try to read single words that only flash on-screen while they are being spoken?

I think this trend is partially driven by the silent auto play that happens on YouTube. Baked in subtitles help draw people into the video.

They could also just upload those transcriptions as normal closed-captioning srt subtitles...

not all social media will show subtitles/captions tho, which is the challenge. YouTube Shorts, TikTok videos, IG reels, FB reels, Whatsapp statuses, and more. I think some allow cc but some don't, and if someone reshares to another platform, it may not be there, so some of us burn them in begrudgingly :-)

It's just so annyoing how someone like Netflix offers like 3-4 languages for most of its content when you can basically get it for free via browser extensions (if you watch on browser).

Must be union thing.

That Netflix who would need to pay more to license more subtitles can't compete with pirated or unlicensed auto-generated subtitles shouldn't really be a surprise.

It's also annoying that you have to pay for Netflix when you can get the same movies for free with less restrictions on a pirate site.

You mean, a sharing site? That is a site where someone benevolently shared a movie with me?

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