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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

Subtitles are often a very dumb failure point, especially when English subtitles aren't available in half the world for basically no reason.

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Similarly annoying is when original language subtitles aren’t available in your region for some reason, even when the audio track of the same language is. Really puts a damper on using foreign media for immersive language learning purposes.

One of the streaming services (I forget if it was Netflix or Amazon) had the original German audio track for Deutschland 83, as well as German subtitles, but the German subtitles were machine-translated from the English subtitles. Maddening!

Max has an anime and we stopped watching because even though English subtitles and English dubbed audio was available the original Japanese audio was always strangely delayed by days or weeks and the only way to tell it had been added was to check manually.

Lazarus?

Yes. We figured it was a mistake and watched a single dubbed episode and it was terrible. IIRC when I googled it I found out it was an intentional decision and of course people were talking about just pirating the original.

Edit: It has been some months, but I also vaguely recall the episodes getting the Japanese audio out of order, which is why we thought it was just a mistake for that episode until we 'caught up' to the newest episodes.

I have another problem, which is that my wife is Japanese and I’m American, and if we watch a French movie then I want the English subs and she wants the Japanese subs. Making that work with streaming services is very painful.

I had never thought of this before. What is the solution? Can any video software show two subtitles at once?

I developed a tool (https://github.com/smacke/ffsubsync) which can sync subtitles against each other (or even against an audio track), and this can be used in conjunction with other tools such as https://pypi.org/project/srt/ to combine multiple subtitle streams into a single stream. I've used this strategy to good effect to get both English and Chinese subtitles up at once.

VLC, mpv, and SMPlayer all support dual subtitles, with varying amounts of fiddling.

https://old.reddit.com/r/VLC/comments/hnle2o/dual_subtitles/

https://superuser.com/questions/1255487/how-to-get-vlc-to-di...

For Netflix and YouTube I actually use a language learning chrome extension called Migaku, that has this feature - but if there don’t exist subs, can also sometimes pull it off with a chrome extension for dual subs - forget what it is called but I can download SRT files and load them up alongside a stream. Both are not reliable and require significant fiddling.

Anecdotally, for a long time dual French and German subtitles was the standard in Swiss cinemas when movie was shown in original language. So your usecase is not that unusual !

Same in Belgium, top line was Dutch, bottom line was French

And don't miss the situations where the subtitles are baked into the stream: HBO Max is very fond of just not letting you remove subtitles at all for at least a few non-english series.

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