Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles
daiz.moe
daiz.moe
I see you doing a ton of styling, which makes it a very pleasant reading experience, may I ask what techniques do you use? Is cyan just to replace bold or something else?
The good/old subtitles in the ASS format required a more complex playback system than what Netflix/Hulu (and maybe blueray players) currently offer. This could be worked around by burning the subs into the video stream, but then you need to keep separate copies of your (large) video files for each subtitled language.
That doesn't seem like it'd be such a huge problem to me, but what do I know?
The post does a good job explaining the effective monopoly system at play that prevents real competition to provide any pressure to improve or maintain the prior quality.
Assuming each video in its largest bitrate is... 2gb for example, and assuming S3 is $0.025/gb, that's a nickle per month or let's say $0.50/yr for that video.
Next up is reduced bitrates, assume you go from 2gb to 1gb and finally 500mb. Round up and you're at $1/video.
Now duplicate it to AV1 and MP4, and multiply that by English, French, and Spanish (oh, and let's say Japanese and Chinese too for good measure).
So a single 2gb video goes from $1/yr to $10/yr, and you're not doing "the dumb simple thing" for subtitles which would basically 4x your cost over "commodity subtitling services".
Or "simplify, simplify simplify", you reduce costs (cha-ching!), and become compatible for syndication or redistribution (cha-ching!)
... and they would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for those meddling kids!
You don't need to multiply anything here, except the number of sub streams. One is ass, the other the primitive standards Netflix and other surges use.
Edit: and to the peer comment regarding S3 vs self host: regardless of 10x cloud cost, it's still 10x volume. Where 1TB local would do, now you need 10TB (10x the cost).
>Yes, it really is called ASS. Its predecessor, SubStation Alpha, went by SSA, and since these formats were developed by enthusiast hobbyists, I believe they couldn’t resist the siren song of a little bit of cheeky naming.
Keeping the "hard subs" content is a lot of videos as the subtitles were encoded into the video stream.
This makes CDNs and other systems more difficult to utilize because we have a ton of video streams with just caption changes as opposed to just the Japanese audio source + caption files.
It's one of those things that doesn't seem that problematic till you include all the video_qualities to support streaming bandwith. So you also get a #hardSubLanguages * #videoQualities
I’m pretty sure it’s not too hard to implement an ASS → PNG renderer (especially considering vibe coding is now a thing). Then, just need to split out subs that can be actual text somehow from the ones that have to be overlays.
Apart from that... surely they could at least keep ASS subs for the players that support it, and serve “fallback” subs for low-end devices?
You can also use the same kind of segment-based playlist approach on Blu-ray if you wanted to, though theoretically you should be able to use the Blu-ray Picture-in-Picture feature to store the typesetting in a separate partially transparent video stream entirely that is then overlaid on top of the clean video during playback.
We did do inlaid server-side ads that way for a while.
IT just takes an excessive amount of work.
The real solution is just the full support of ASS/TTML/VTT subtitles on all platforms. Usually smart devices are kind of only partially supported.
For instance - casting to a chromecast fallsback to SRT.
You'd see playback issues go up by 1000%.
In the nicest possible way, it is pretty clear that this article was written by somebody who has only ever looked at video distribution as a hobbyist and not deploying it at scale to paying customers who quite reasonably get very upset at things not working reliably.
Only english is the most popular and just keep it. Most of the good hard subs are made for english and that is what people want.
It's really tough when you need to scale these things across 20 platforms.
Also I remember when CR killed the Kodi plugin, that irked me enough to stick to DVD imports + fan subs for a while.
Finally, Ruri Rocks is such a good show, it got me to resubscribe to CR after not having subbed for years. If they screw with its subs I'm gonna root for this mess to bankrupt CR for good.
> 4. Line Treatment
> 2 lines maximum
This could be the toughest show to sub with all the geological explaination and jargon the adapter must be familiar with.
Adding to that the line limit, The bar to cross sounds quite hard.
I only had time to skim the article, so adding this show to my to-do list has been my main takeaway so far.
Would you pirate for better subtitles? Assuming Crunchroll has the legal rights to the content pinned down, that may be the only way to apply legitimate pressure.
In general, streaming services have to ensure maximum compatibility when playing their contents on all kinds of devices - high end and low end. For which on low end device it could be very resource constraining to render typesetted subtitles. There are other platforms where all video playback have to be managed by the platform system frameworks with limited format support, and streaming services can't do much about it.
The priority of streaming service is extending their market reach, and I think Crunchyroll itself is facing the same challenge of market reaching.
I think the right solution is trying to get typesetted subtitles, and the end-to-end workflow - creation, packaging, delivery, rendering with adaptation (device capabilities, user preferences, localizations etc) all standardized. A more efficient workflow is needed, so a single source of subtitle is able to generate a set of renditions suitable for different player render capabilities. Chrunchyroll should actively participate in these standard bodies and push for adaption for more features and support in the streaming industry.
Frankly, those text-based subtitle standards are quite maddening on their own. Netflix's text-based subtitle rendering seems to support a much wider set of TTML features than what it actually allows subtitle providers to use - so if these restrictions were to be slightly relaxed, providers could start offering better subtitles for anime immediately with no additional effort from Netflix.
The BBC spent literally years trying to engineering something that did not result in it being unable to playback video smoothly and failed.
Surely if my mid-end phone from 2015 supported everything .ASS has to offer, they could do it either?
In any case... I don’t believe the problem is that Netflix and Crunchyroll have to support low-end devices, it’s that they don’t want to pay $$$ for typesetting. They are big enough now that they don’t have to care, so they don’t – just another example of enshittification.
Playing video on Youtube causes much more cpu load than playing the video with the same av1 (or even more computationally intensive vp9) codec in VLC.
So render them only on high end devices? Computers allow making dynamic choices.
My wife is deaf and I like dubbed so I can use my laptop while we chill but she literally needs subtitles so it's super annoying when a show either
1. Has no subtitles for dubbed.
2. Their subtitles are just the subbed version's subtitles which are drastically different from what the dubbed VAs are actually saying.
3. Has subtitles for some episodes but none for others seemingly randomly.
GabeN saying that piracy is first and foremost a service problem is still right on the money.
I get that you might not like it, but it sure beats the option you didn't list:
4. Has auto-generated subtitles for the dub that fail in dramatic and distracting ways, especially for proper nouns or any kind of show-specific invented terminology
Gaben proven right yet again.
Though on a related topic, on Netflix it is not just the subtitling that is bad, the translations are awful too. They are cutting every corner so hard I fear they might become a circle.
"natural world" -> "national world"
"cede power" -> "seed power"
I guess they're just machine transcribing it without oversight now?
[14:08] "I'm told high, Jerry." -> "I'm told… Hi, Jerry." (in response to being asked "What's your level of confidence on that?")
I always wonder why they don't have a way to upload the shooting script as a starting point so they could then make changes from there.
We're truly seeded our language to a bunch of crappy algorithms...
Here's some examples (there are many more):
1) the explanation of puns and hidden meanings in the kanji used to describe names, locations, special abilities, jokes, which honorifics are being used currently (if any), etc. of which there are usually many. Understanding/being aware of this context used to be absolutely vital to the experience of reading manga.
2) there's a relatively new manga called "Versus", in which humans from parallel earths, in parallel universes all merge into the same universe, and their planets are also merged together. In the english version, Viz translates one of those worlds as "Indignia", which doesn't mean anything. However, the Japanese for this world is "怒ど神しん界かい" (Doshinkai), which is literally interpreted as "World of the Angry God", or "Mad God World". They took it upon themselves to make similar changes for all the other worlds, obscuring their original meanings as intended by the author... why? Beats me. Now, one could make the argument that "Mad God World" doesn't sound good in english, so the Viz translators change is an improvement, which is not unreasonable. However, any half-decent fan translator would've simply left a footnote like "the literal Japanese interpretation is X; I changed it to Indignia because...". Problem solved! Don't just retcon things because you feel like it without explaining yourself. And if you won't explain yourself, then leave it as is.
3) english One Piece readers often have no idea just how many things are lost in translation; One Piece is filled to the brim with puns, double-entendre's, and foreshadowing, which has always been a significant part of its appeal, and is now nowhere to be found via the official providers.
4) Physical signs, such as things written on buildings, on somebody's clothing, or even on a stop sign, are usually not translated.
5) cover pages! You wouldn't know it anymore, but manga often has cover pages (often officially colorized) with extra comments and tidbits from the authors. Fans would include these pages in their scanlations. Viz pretends they don't exist.
I can only imagine the thought process of whoever's making these decisions at Viz (or its parent company Shueisha) resembles something like "westerners don't care about that stuff. Stop wasting precious time and resources trying to explain it". They don't quite seem to understand how badly they have diluted the manga reading experience in the west, especially for those of us that grew up reading this stuff, way before it reached mainstream popularity.
It's a combination of indignation and the suffix ia, meaning land of.
Still, that's a bit complicated because it's missing something essential that the author had originally intended. It's like replacing "Mad God World" with "Unjust World"... well, they're very much all unjust, have to be more specific.
This is even more of a reason why they really should be explaining these self-insert puns to the readers, since they invented them. It's a nice touch is all, and fan translators made that (among the other things I mentioned) a standard practice.
Personally, I tend to agree that a need to explain a translation represents a failure to come up with a satisfying equivalent in the target language.
At the end of the day, when a phrase has multiple meanings (as intended by the author), it can be impossible to translate it into a single, tidy, english catchphrase. This is why in manga raw's (the original, non-translated versions), when authors write kanji characters, they will often superscript them with smaller, hiragana characters. This is essential because in japanese, those kanji characters usually have multiple meanings, so it's necessary to guide the reader towards the intended ones. And even from there, the re-interpreted hiragana characters/words themselves can have multiple - sometimes conflicting - meanings. It's in these conflicts that puns/dual meanings can arise. It's all part of the beauty of the language, and mangaka's are obsessed with showing that (as they should be).
So this sort of nuance will always be lost in translation, but can be essential.
Couldn't they also provide Amazon and Netflix a version of the video stream with baked in subtitles?
Netflix: https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/215...
> Netflix requires a non-subtitled version of the content. Netflix defines “non-subtitled” as the presence of main titles, end credits, location call-outs, and other supportive/creative text, but no burned-in subtitled dialogue, regardless of the language in the primary video.
Amazon: https://videocentral.amazon.com/support/delivery-experience/...
> Video
> Global packaging requires component asset packages to be delivered with a semi-textless video file that can be localized with discrete subtitles and audio dubbing.
> Also known as “Texted with no subtitles,” “Textless with main, ends, and graphic text,” and “Non-subtitled”, Prime Video defines semi-textless as a video master without burned-in subtitles, regardless of the language.
But here’s the other thing - CR could have used the ASS subs on their website and given the less-dynamic sub files to their vendors. You can save a master subtitle file in whatever format you want.
This is exactly what CR was doing for the past couple years, though you can't just automatically convert a fancy ASS file with typesetting into the limited kind of TTML subtitles that general streaming services expect, which is why Crunchyroll has been paying its subtitling staff extra to make those conversions semi-manually.
Though Crunchyroll could definitely improve its standard ASS workflows in ways that would make that conversion process significantly more automated with minimal extra effort on the subtitling staff's part. It wouldn't even be that hard, I've done something like that myself when I had to mangle ASS into limited WebVTT for some streaming work I did at one point.
Surely automatically converting into a lesser subtitle format is a much better use of AI than machine transcription. I disagree with the idea that "you can't just automatically convert" at today's technology level.
The result works pretty well, e.g. https://www.translate.mom/app/task/2UicdIqRBg0f
How long did it take you to learn a language to arrive at a level where you can watch a movie/TV program with tons of idioms and cultural references and easily understand > 95% of it?
Either way it’s bad business to throw some of your most loyal customers under the bus, regardless of how big of a portion they represent. Dub viewers tend to be more casual and fickle and will largely evaporate once the zeitgeist of popular media moves from anime onto something else.
Period accents are another place dubs can have an advantage, particularly in shows like Baccano! where the characters are ostensibly speaking English to start with.
It can also vary by localization studio. I didn't care for the English Spy x Family dub, but to my ear the Chinese dub is just as good as the original Japanese. For some reason the actors in many English dubs seem to have a hard time "really going for it" when a scene requires an over-the-top outburst of emotions.
I'm sorry but it's so strange to me. To me it's like putting on your favorite song, but it's in Spanish so it's dubbed by a much worse singer who sings it in English.
I also don't understand why one would watch a film or show on one screen while playing a game or something on another screen. Either the film or show is so boring and trite that you need something else to distract you - in which case why ever watch it at all? - or you're missing out by not focusing on something good.
If it's a 4-hour podcast or a random infotainment YouTube video, sure, it makes sense to put that on while playing a game or programming or whatever. But an actual polished show? I don't get it.
I have ADHD. I struggle to concentrate on anything. I would rather have the ability to be distracted for a bit and still be able to follow the show, than have to rewind it constantly or force myself to concentrate on something (which my brain doesn't enjoy). I don't need a distraction from a boring show, I need something else to keep me engaged.
I'm not sure why you are putting infotainment youtube videos in their own category, I treat them just the same. If it has visuals that I want to see, I'll put it on my second monitor and watch it while I'm doing something else. Not while programming, because that requires its own focus, or a narrative game, but more a sandbox game like minecraft or factorio
It's like going to watch The Godfather in a movie theater and you scroll HN on your tablet the whole time during it.
I have severe ADHD as well and am distracted very easily and am constantly playing content while doing other things. But there's a difference between "content" and "art".
The voice actors become well known and some were popular . . . although they can really change the tone of a movie (for good or bad) which they said was sometimes jarring when watching the movie in the original language.
I remember them saying they Manuel in Fawlty Towers is cast as Mexican, which is darkly humorous to me.
Most everything in Spain was dubbed, which lead to common cultural outcomes that are very different from English dubbing.
I'm sure they had a lot of awful dubbing, but apparently the results were regularly an improvement (voice actors changing the outcome to be more Spanish in a way that worked well).
My second hand opinion, based on a conversation from years ago, so I can't be that clear about it.
https://deadline.com/2025/09/box-office-demon-slayer-infinit...
The market has spoken, indeed.
In the article, there's zero explanation of what the actual issue is, at least in the first few paragraphs. It just seems to say the subtitles are bad with some examples and puts the burden on the reader to determine why.
Is the issue the subtitle's location on the screen ? Contrast or font? Quality of translations? Again, it's probably a spectrum thing, but without any context I find it overwhelming and overstimulating.
Both the "good" and "bad" quality examples contain subtitles with no discernible difference. All examples contain legible subtitles. So where's the "nosedive"?
There's clearly some anime-specific context and nuance that is NOT communicated with context-less screencaps.
Perhaps the article wasn't written for someone unfamiliar with anime, and I'm not meant to understand, but it would be helpful to have the difference explained. Not to mention the improved accessibility for screen readers or folks with sensory processing issues like myself. At a minimum, marking up the image would be helpful. Circle things. Arrows. Help me understand, don't drop me into unfamiliar territory and leave me to guess.
In the bad examples, the translations for the texts are mixed with the lines the characters are speaking, which makes it harder to follow.
I spent quite some hours on CR, yet it was maybe until 30 seconds later before I realized what the "nosedive" refers to exactly. In fact, I kept thinking "quality" refers to "translation quality" and I was puzzled I could not see obvious issues.
It doesn't need to be that. Anyone given side-by-side screenshots without additional contexts should immediately tell you what's happening, and I've read lots of blog posts like that.
More specifically, the article provides 4 bad screenshots at fitst. I actually went through 3 of them. I kind of guessed what you meant but wasn't sure. Then there is another gallery of good ones. Why? Just provide good vs bad at the top, explicitly explain what's the expectation, and if needed, provide more examples. That'll be 200% better than this.
Hopefully you can see I was disappointed because it was something I wanted to care about, I just wasn't sure what it actually was I was supposed to care about.
I appreciate your openness to feedback, and I think the article is better for it.
They are very negative words and it is rude to use them when referring to someone else's work or things similar to that work.
TFA is certainly not lazy (and it's very obvious to an NT that a LOT of effort went into it).
We should ideally all be producing content in an accessible way when possible. But doing so is difficult and is a learned skill set.
Making things accessible to NDs can be difficult because normal written English heavily utilizes things that NDs can be unable to intuitively process.
There is also often a trade-off involved in making work accessible. Aesthetically specifically, artistically generally, or in terms of brevity or convenience to others.
Your inability to read the context clues and process the visual information is your inability to do something. A thing that the vast majority of people can do. TFA clearly wasn't intended as insulting and your interpretation of it as insulting is unfortunate.
Your very specific needs are not the needs of the vast majority of people who are reading it. If you cannot see the difference in subtitles between the two sets of examples and tell that one is bad, then you are not the main target audience.
The new generation of subtitles are bland and poorly integrated with the context.
Previous subtitles were attractive and well integrated, with colours, typefaces, orientations and locations picked to best suit the content. Everything (including background signs) are translated with attention paid to details.
The article uses a lot of visual examples to explain this. It is written in a way that is intuitive and easy to digest for most people. I can literally skim this and understand it.
If you wished to write your comment in a way that wasn't rude to the OP, you could provide the same important information without using negative language:
"I am autistic and don't watch anime. I've read the first few paragraphs and I'm finding it overwhelming and overstimulating to precisely identify the problem.
What is the exact issue? The subtitle's location on the screen? Contrast or font? Quality of translations?"
Relevant parts of TFA that explain are:
>...translations for dialogue and on-screen text aren’t even separated to different sides of the screen – everything is just bunched up together at either the top or the bottom. Lots of on-screen text is even left straight up untranslated.
>The amount of it varies from series to series, but almost every anime out there makes use of on-screen text at one point or another, with some featuring downright ridiculous amounts of signs (what on-screen text is called for short). With all this on-screen text, it is also very common for there to be text visible on the screen potentially in multiple positions, even when characters are speaking.
>At bare minimum, when subtitling anime, you should be able to do overlaps (multiple lines of text on the screen at the same time) and positioning (the ability to freely place subtitles anywhere on the screen).
>Overlaps and positioning are really just the bare necessities for dealing with on-screen text in anime though – ideally, you should also be able to use different fonts, colors, animate text in various ways, etc. Making use of all these possibilities is an art unto itself, and this art of on-screen text localization is commonly referred to as typesetting. Typesetting is important even when dubbing anime, as all that on-screen text is going to be there in the video all the same!
>[Crunchyroll started] mangling subtitles with typesetting into something compatible with the awful subtitling standards of the general streaming services [Netflix and Amazon Prime].
With that in mind, I don't have the energy to read the rest of your reply. I appreciate you taking the time to respond, and I'm sorry if my phrasing wasn't clear. I'm sure it's a great article, and I meant in no way to insult the author.
I'm just not equipped to gather much meaning from it the way the information is presented.
Yes I do believe the type of coworker who uses a screenshot to communicate instead of describing an issue is indeed lazy and insulting.
The article on the other hand clearly isn't lazy. It's obviously quite thorough, just at the time was not well organized.
As someone who grew up where 90% of TV was subtitled I find the “bad” anime subtitles much better.
Note that anime has generally more text on the screen that many western shows, so I think subtitling practices of some subtitle-heavy western countries, while informed and proven by time, don't necessarily represent optimal practices for anime.
But I think you are correct about the subtitle preferences of anime fans. The "general wisdom" of audiovisual translations is that great translations manage to convey the important point very succinctly, and a professional translator knows how to shave off the fluff to achieve subtitles that are quick to read and "fade in the background" in the sense that you don't even realize that you are reading them.
However, many anime fans actually LIKE so-called foreignizing translations ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_and_foreignizati... ). I think this plays into the fancier subtitle preferences too.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, it's extremely difficult for me to determine which of those thousand words are applicable, and without guidance introduces a ton of noise.
The gist of it is this: Subtitles were a huge part of anime culture.
1. Subtitles were great at one point. Demonstration is this video: https://daiz.moe/content/crunchyroll/klk-underwater-1.mp4 The English subtitles are so well integrated, that they feel like they are part of the original scene. But actually, they are added in post!
In these times, great subtitles were done by a vibrant, legally grey, dedicated subculture. Subtitling, at this point, is about craftsmanship, and appreciation of culture. Anime at this point is a niche, even though becoming more and more popular in the West.
2. Subtitles are becoming more like this: https://daiz.moe/content/crunchyroll/mha-funi-hulu.jpg
Anime at this point is mainstream in the West. This is the corporate version of the same, where subtitling is seen as a problem to be solved as cheaply as possible. The culture around it seems to be dissolved, as the subtitles are now determined by corporate issues, not craftsmen, or connoisseurs.
I cannot imagine how much more difficult of life you make yourself with this kind of reaction to someone writing extensively on an article nobody forced - much less even asked - you to read.
I did not mean the article was lazy, I meant that specifically about hypothetical co workers.
The article was at the time reminiscent of said hypothetical co workers, but not at all the same thing. My wording was charged, but not really unclear. The first paragraph is about one subject and the second paragraph was about another.
For the first it is translating the info box on the left and just adding it above its dialog subtitles. This has a few problems. First the text overlaps the text in the box, not the worst thing here but that can sometimes make things hard to read and imo doesn't look good.
Second it can make it hard to know what is being translated if there are multiple text fragments on screen. Take this screenshot from the article https://daiz.moe/content/crunchyroll/dumbell-funi-4.jpg how are you supposed to know which belong to which muscle? Or this where only one of the rows is translated and you don't even know which https://daiz.moe/content/crunchyroll/mha-funi-hulu.jpg
Third with two dialogs to translate (like tv in background plus people in foreground) you could probably better indicate where what is coming from with the ability to position it.