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Comment by NoahZuniga | Hacker News Reader

> With such typesetting-hostile standards to deal with, Crunchyroll had basically two choices for how to make sublicensing to Amazon and Netflix work with their existing subtitles that feature actual typesetting: Either 1) try to negotiate with the services for permission to make use of more TTML capabilities (that the subtitle renderers of said services should already support!) or 2) start mangling subtitles with typesetting into something compatible with the awful subtitling standards of the general streaming services.

Couldn't they also provide Amazon and Netflix a version of the video stream with baked in subtitles?

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Both services explicitly disallow this by default in their delivery specifications, unfortunately.

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.

Those vendors likely won’t accept hardsubs, because it would mean 10 video files for 10 languages, instead of soft subs where you get 1 video file 10 languages (10 different subtitle files).

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.

> CR could have used the ASS subs on their website and given the less-dynamic sub files to their vendors.

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.

> 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.

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.

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