I was relieved when I read that original article because I really did think it was just me. It really annoys me because when CC is on, my eyes tend to focus on them even if I don't need it for a particular sentence or scene. I feel that takes away from enjoying the film since I'm so laser focused on the CC. I've tried to ease my focus up a bit, but I just can't seem to do it; if CC is on, that's where my eyes go.
I do wonder if a new UI/UX for CC could resolve some of that issue. Maybe something like using AI/ML to dynamically place the CC closest to the person speaking so I don't need to direct my eyes at the bottom of the screen and can have both the text and the actor's face in my field of vision?
Anyways, just some random thoughts from someone who is increasingly annoyed by not being able to make out what the hell people are saying on screen anymore!
> Maybe something like using AI/ML to dynamically place the CC closest to the person speaking so I don't need to direct my eyes at the bottom of the screen and can have both the text and the actor's face in my field of vision?
I think this would be even worse, at least for me. Now not only are there distracting words on the screen, but they're also jumping around erratically!
I wish there was an option to delay closed captions so that they appear after the line is spoken, rather than before. That way, I'd be hearing the line before reading it, rather than the other way around, so it doesn't ruin the delivery. It would also make it easier to ignore captions when I don't need them, because I could just glance to the bottom of the screen after I miss a word rather than having to preemptively read everything just in case.
The new Cyberpunk 2077 show on Netflix does something like this. For some characters who are speaking in a different language, the regular subtitles are replaced with text placed “in” the scene just like how it appears in the game. (When outside of a conversation, if an NPC speaks in a different language, the text is displayed near their heads like a speech bubble without the bubble)
I had no trouble with this in the game, but in the show it was very distracting. Probably because in the game I could change where I looked to focus on the text of I wanted to.
"Now not only are there distracting words on the screen, but they're also jumping around erratically!"
The actors are jumping around erratically and we track them fine. Even if the text always appears in the same place, it still comes at unpredictable times (temporally erratic). And even normal cc moves around within an area anyway. We track all of those randomizations just fine, without thought or effort.
I don't know until someone tries it, but I can imagine it becoming perfectly natural and someone used to that would find the idea of having to look away to the text maddening. It wouldn't (well, might not) be perceived as jumping around but the opposite, placed already where you are looking.
Even when the text does have to jump from where you are looking, because a new speaker spoke, even that might be better than today, because it draws your attention to the new speaker or i terruption. I often actually get confused by normal cc because all speakers are rendered identically and it's not always clear who said what, and sometimes not even clear that a given string of words is from 3 different speakers. By the time you puzzle it out the whole scene is gone and you're now about to miss some new dialog that's about to disappear before you've started interpreting it.
It would hinge a lot on what they said about getting it right. Surely you could make this idea terrible. But surely it's at least possible to imagine a version that isn't terrible. Different fonts, sizes, colors, placement, borders, etc could all combine to make something far more natural to ingest that what we have now.
Like a better version of comic book speech bubbles. No not literally exactly like them. But some aspects of them, such as how they don't all look identical. Thoughts look different than speech. Yelling looks different than speaking. Emotion and intent are conveyed as well, etc.
> I wish there was an option to delay closed captions so that they appear after the line is spoken, rather than before.
That’s what I do with VLC. Just press J (or K I never remember) a few times. Around 1s it’s exactly what you describe. You can then occasionally glance after the delivery if you missed a word.
I'm the exact opposite - if a TV show/film doesn't have subtitles available then I won't even watch it. I don't enjoy going to the cinema for the same reason.
My understanding is that Cinemas often have what essentially are individual teleprompter reflection screens that you can use, and have CC projected onto them. It's an old feature, thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act, and I don't know how well the feature or a replacement survived the digital transition, but legally speaking there is probably an equivalent.
You can set a video player to delay subs - it's absolutely awful. My spouse prefers having the subs in almost all cases - helps mumbling (talking through their asses as it being called) profoundly.
I watch everything with CC (few shows I watch have explosions, I need it more for some British accents and Americans mumbling), I never get distracted, but the combination of audio and text combines, I might miss what was said, or not read the CC because I’m looking at my phone, but after the scene is over I could not tell you if I used CC or audio, it becomes one.
Not sure if it’s related, but I also read a lot in general.
It's also a matter of just getting used to it over a (probably fairly long) period of time. I've been watching anime in Japanese with English subtitles since I was 14 years old, so it's just normal for me to have subs/CC.
(Fun fact: This only works for me if the subs are in English. If they are in my native language, German, I get really distracted.)
When I watch Japanese content with subtitles, my eyes are drawn to the subtitles even though I don't need them, and then I'm doubly distracted when the subtitles are wrong or misleading.
My eyes are also drawn to Japanese subtitles of Hollywood movies when I go the theatre in Japan, and that leads to the same problem. It's a curse.
The only subtitles that I've found useful, albeit still being a distraction most of the time, are the ones in the language that is spoken.
My Japanese is unfortunately not at a level where I could watch Japanese content without subtitles, so I actually need them. But I do agree that it is distracting if they are wrong or translated in a weird way. I'm actually holding off on watching Cyberpunk Edgerunners because I've heard that Netflix's subs are very liberal (or maybe they are dubtitles? not sure).
The worst thing is if the the spoken language and the subtitle language are the same, but the subs are incomplete or don't fully represent what is spoken.
> (Fun fact: This only works for me if the subs are in English. If they are in my native language, German, I get really distracted.)
Hah, wouldn’t be able to tell you, the only thing we watched in German in years has been Dark, and there we had English subs so my wife (not a native) would have an easier time ;)
It happens super rarely for me as well, mainly the one time a year I watch a movie at a movie theater because they tend to use German subs for original screenings.
If we're going to use AI why not just use it to normalise the volumes and boost the voice volume. I'm pretty sure voice separation is a more or less solved problem.
Free product idea for someone with more time than me.
The biggest issue I have with CC is that it ruins comedy. You can literally see the punchline coming, but don’t really get the effect because you miss the timing, and all the vocal subtlety.
Hand timed subs could still preserve the punchline. The problem is many subs are obviously OCR scanned from text.
But the pirate scene has people dedicated to writing subs, and are often credited in them. There is no reason Hollywood could pay someone to curate their subtitles.
>There is no reason Hollywood could pay someone to curate their subtitles.
There is because passion will always create a higher quality product than pay.
Subtitles in the pirate scene are good because the person subbing it cares about the source material.
Same reason some commercial versions of classic or rare movies are terrible quality, same reason Seinfeld on Netflix is cropped to 16:9 rather than 4:3.
Yet people in the piracy scene for no pay will take the visuals from a laserdisc version, missing scenes from a dvd, sound and subs from a Blu-ray, fix the subs and then combine it all into a perfect version of a movie. People who actually care put the effort in And the scene polices trash, 16:9 Seinfeld/Simpsons would get deleted from any good private tracker but Netflix/Disney execs are fine with it.
What about a CC app, you tell app I am watching Film A
App shows just you CC for A,
benefit you can go back and see previous CC in A without stopping film and annoying other watchers.
Sort CC by character etc.
Play audio for that particular CC at volume you set, so you pop ear bud in to rehear what exactly was said just before the big fight scene.
Search text for CC for film A, get timestamp for that scene, go to that scene (obviously that functionality you can find other places but might be useful to have inside the CC app)
Same for me with this article. I thought it was me and maybe my hearing was just bad from all those years of concerts. I live in an apartment that does not have super thick walls so my choices are (a) subtitles or (b) be a bad neighbor and blast the volume or this article seems to suggest that adding more channels would help understand while still keeping the volume low?
mpv does this (must enable manually for SSA subs). In VLC you can also add the black bars to the video with a filter so the subtitles draw on top of them, but some renderers won't like the aspect ratio change.
An annoyance is that deliberately absolutely-positioned subtitles (e.g., translating onscreen text) are shifted too -- more ideally the feature would only apply to subs without inline margins. Similarly, the time delay from in the sibling thread is undesirable for subs that are timed exactly to what's onscreen, though that's much less programmatically identifiable.
I was relieved when I read that original article because I really did think it was just me. It really annoys me because when CC is on, my eyes tend to focus on them even if I don't need it for a particular sentence or scene. I feel that takes away from enjoying the film since I'm so laser focused on the CC. I've tried to ease my focus up a bit, but I just can't seem to do it; if CC is on, that's where my eyes go.
I do wonder if a new UI/UX for CC could resolve some of that issue. Maybe something like using AI/ML to dynamically place the CC closest to the person speaking so I don't need to direct my eyes at the bottom of the screen and can have both the text and the actor's face in my field of vision?
Anyways, just some random thoughts from someone who is increasingly annoyed by not being able to make out what the hell people are saying on screen anymore!