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Comment by ollysb | Hacker News Reader

Who loses out when fans provide subtitles for films? My partner's native tongue is Spanish and so we often want to watch films with Spanish subtitles. Unfortunately it seems incredibly rare that subtitles are provided through legal channels. I can't tell you the number of times I've paid for a film in iTunes only to discover that there are no subtitles available in _any_ language. There's subler but the timing usually doesn't match which means I'm forced to go to the pirate bay to download a film that we can watch that I've already paid for. The fans are filling a gap here which, speaking personally, I'm extremely grateful for and incredulous that film companies don't provide themselves. To shut people down when they're effectively doing your job for you (and the fans aren't taking any money) is infuriating to say the least. /rant

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Exactly. "Pirates" are just under-served customers. And in this case, they are not even "stealing" anything, they are filling a market vacuum by creating a new product for which there is significant demand and no other supply.

My wife is from China and wants to have Chinese subtitles when she watches American shows and movies with me. Where is she supposed to get them? The copyright holders and licensed content providers simply don't offer them. Fansubs are literally the only available option.

Wow - you have summed it up perfectly. "Pirates are just under-served customers"

Imagine if the Executives at the all of these entertainment companies looked at it like this.

I no longer buy the "under-served" customer concept, unless by "under-served", you mean they're waiting for "I want it delivered exactly when I want, in the format I want, to do with as I want, for free" to be "served" to them. I'm sure there is a some truth to it, but the fact that the "Pay what you want" Humble Indie bundles are pirated, along with thousands of $0.99 mobile apps, indicates that many people won't pay even a pittance for content they clearly want, no matter how convenient the delivery or noble the causes.

15 years after movie has been released and no more US DVD copies available, only DVD available in Spanish markets with no English (and of course no Russian) soundtrek. Of course cool and patient me would learn Spanish... (not that i have anything against learning and even plan it eventually as well as Chinese. Ni-hao-ma? do-shao-t'en? ni-dzao-sha-ma-minz?)

And speaking about really under-served - there are deaf people among us.

>15 years after movie has been released and no more US DVD copies available, only DVD available in Spanish markets with no English (and of course no Russian) soundtrek.

Sure -- but the most popular torrents are always the latest hollywood films (not to mention screeners or rips before they are even released on a DVD).

The case for "15 years old movies with no US DVD copies" are not really representative of the majority of cases. The long tail, maybe.

How does the "majority of torrent cases" relate to subtitles question?

Because subtitles are used with movies.

And those movies come from torrents, more often than not, (even worse, subtitles are actually made for specific rips, with respect to frame rates and sync, and say so in their metadata).

That's a perfectly fine argument for piracy of most content, but makes no sense in this context, where these subs really are not available legally.

Humble Bundle could do more work with their payment options. Bitcoin was a good addition, I think, but not enough.

As for $1 mobile apps, same deal but with less confidence that the app is worth even trying, much less paying for.

Can't there be both? Certainly there's lots of people that pirate to avoid paying (either from greed or limited budget). Or they pirate for moral reasons: not wanting to support companies that are lobbying against personal rights.

But "underserved" still exists. I'll discuss Netflix as I have the most experience with them, but I think most of it holds true for iTunes, too. FWIW, Amazon's video service seems a bit worse than Netflix.

Pirating movies offers a far superior playback experience. Netflix usually has shitty subtitles: limited languages, sometimes ALL CAPS, no choice of hearing-impaired versus speech, no rich overlays (like some anime subtitles, where they'll overlay translations next to signs, etc.). The audio channels are also limited - many shows only offer terrible English dubs.

There's no easy way to take advantage of your sound setup. With normal players on Windows, it's trivial for me to divert low-frequencies to my subwoofer (using the simple on-motherboard audio jacks). No special hardware required. On Netflix? Uh, use the Xbox (ugh) and hope the movie has a 5.1 track.

I can't control quality on Netflix. Switching to HD is a crapshoot, even with a solid connection, and sometimes HD just isn't available. Jumping around, even to parts I've already watched, requires buffering again. And if a show is too dark/light, I can apply video corrections, too.

Oh, and if you're travelling? Enjoy the library of content randomly changing, and then you'll find certain shows lose their English audio/text and require <geo-located country's> audio or subtitles. Not to mention being able to copy a file over to a tablet for a drive or flight.

Plus, DRM doesn't get in the way. My folks have Netflix on an Apple TV (with a shitty Toshiba LCD TV). They regularly get HDCP errors, that seem to go away at random (change HDMI cables, restart things, try different HDMI ports on the TV).

Netflix wins purely on that it makes discovery and management easy and the UI is simpler (duh). The actual core playback product is terribly subpar.

I pay for Netflix and Hulu, and still download the content they offer to avoid these problems. I use Netflix mainly to check out a new show when I'm literally too lazy to pull over my wireless keyboard and grab a torrent.

Netflix, studios and TV would be terribly upset if someone bothered to write a torrent search/download/manage/playback UI that was as slick as Netflix.

>along with thousands of $0.99 mobile app

99 cents, once, is a pittance. When it's repeated over and over, it stops being a pittance. The app stores are flooded with minimum-price apps that are useless trash. I completely understand people that pirate cheap apps when there are no demo features.

WE are not asking you to "buy" anything, we just tell you that subtitles are a requirement to any video stream, not an option.

And when that requirement is not provided, what we have is flawed product being sold.

And now with this news it seems that some people insist on their right of selling flawed product.

Again, there is no point of arguing if you don't understand it.

Unless I'm mistaken, there is no Hollywood-approved way of getting a movie in such a format that allows to apply your own subtitles to it. Therefore, all the customers of this site are pirates, and annoying pirates is what the Copyright Industry does.

From their point of view, it doesn't hurt their customers in the slightest, because their customers don't need subtitles (and if they did, they wouldn't be able to use them either way).

I am pretty sure you can use subtitle files when playing DVDs with vlc.

But Bluray requires HDCP, right? Meaning the video bits are encrypted all the way to the "secure" output device.

Also, is VLC legally playing DVDs? I thought they used DeCSS or something to bypass the DVD's "protection".

Bypassing DRM is only illegal in some countries so if DeCSS is legal or not depends on where you are. But you are right even legal bypassing of DRM is not Hollywood approved.

>Who loses out when fans provide subtitles for films? My partner's native tongue is Spanish and so we often want to watch films with Spanish subtitles. Unfortunately it seems incredibly rare that subtitles are provided through legal channels. I can't tell you the number of times I've paid for a film in iTunes only to discover that there are no subtitles available in _any_ language. There's subler but the timing usually doesn't match which means I'm forced to go to the pirate bay to download a film that we can watch that I've already paid for.

Maybe so, but in 99% of the cases, the people using the subtitles have not also downloaded the film in iTunes.

They just use them with the film they got off a torrent.

(Sure, they might have also "bought the DVD", but I doubt that too, if my friends are people I know are any indication).

Is that supposed to be a problem? In some countries where basic cause and effect are respected, they don't try to stop you from downloading a copy of a file you already own a license to.

Your parent's point was that 99% of people do not own a license to the file.

Are you sure? The comment was very focused on the download method, even though that should be basically irrelevant.

>The comment was very focused on the download method, even though that should be basically irrelevant.

No, the download method is very much relevant. People download from torrents files they DON'T own any license for (from DVDs or whatever).

The just casually pile on new movies to watch.

Oh, and they are not previewing the movie to "consider it for purchase" either.

I've torrented a bunch of things I own. Ripping videos especially can be a waste of time.

Also think about how awkward it is to record free broadcast television on a computer compared to letting someone else package it.

>I've torrented a bunch of things I own. Ripping videos especially can be a waste of time.

Sure. But that's like 1% of use cases. Most people download movies they don't own -- to see new stuff without having to buy the DVD or go to the movies. Nobody I know (in several countries) downloads only (or even mainly) movies he owns from torrents.

That's how you get screeners on the most popular torrent lists. I seriously doubt those people own the DVD when it's not even released yet.

So, while you do that, and I sometimes do it (rarely), it's not representative of what is usually done.

1% of movies, maybe, but I bet the majority (or at least a very significant portion) of TV downloads are shows that are broadcast free for anyone to watch/record. Those need subtitles just as much.

The customer loses out. Subtitles serve the same purpose as region coding.

I think you mean "the publisher and distributors lose out when geographically exclusive licenses are undermined, and the customer when they are enforced".

It's not geographically exclusive licenses per se; rather an implementation of said licenses which let licensees to provide subpar product in their geo region: later, less accessible and more expensive.

This is not zero sum game. It is possible for both customer and publisher lose; it is possible for both to win at the same time.

Thank you for injecting the basic principle of economics: transactions only occur when both sides win.

Ah, but the transaction here is not between publisher and customer, there are separate and quite different transactions between publisher and distributor as well as distributor and customer (usually with some additional intermediates). In each of them both sides win, but in the latter the customers don't win as much as they could if the first didn't create local monopolies. But publisher and distributor win more, this way.

Your point being?

If the (potential) customer doesn't feel it's a big enough win for the price being asked, they can used their expenditure budget elsewhere to what they perceive to be a bigger gain.

If the price being asked is greater than the cost they are willing to bear, it's up to the (potential) consumers to reassess their priorities within their means.

I did, thanks.

One thing I've noticed in pirated copies of films is that if there is a language being spoken other than english there will often be no translation for it which is especially annoying when a foreign language scence goes on for two or three minutes. I've used http://www.opensubtitles.org/en and vlc to get around this.

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