Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles for no good reason

Netflix implements "imgsub"[1] - it actually delivers a zipped archive of transparent images to the player. So technically they can pre-render positioned typesetted subtitles on server and render them as images overlay, as long as there's no animated text effects.

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.

[1]: https://netflixsubs.app/docs/netflix/features/imgsub

This is the result of a ton of research into Crunchyroll's recent subtitle changes that have tanked the service's first-party presentation quality to an all-time low. The article ended up being quite long, so I highly appreciate anyone taking the time to read it in full!

It's so hard finding dubbed anime WITH subtitles. Like actually ridiculously hard.

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.

Most streaming companies are forgetting what they were competing with when they started out.

Yeah, ASS rendering was a big problem for me when I was making some online subtitling software. I ended up on using https://github.com/ThaUnknown/jassub + using Mediabunny to render a "subtitles" media track on top rendered on a canvas.

The result works pretty well, e.g. https://www.translate.mom/app/task/2UicdIqRBg0f

A similar issue has been plaguing the manga industry since "The Great Scanlator Purge" that took place a few years ago, leaving only the "official" Viz media-contracted translators in the wake of the ruins. For some reason, this change came with a general unwillingness on the translators part to correct, or translate, concepts that virtually all fan translators would've been happy to do.

Some examples:

1) the explanation of puns and hidden meanings in the kanji used to describe names, locations, special abilities, jokes, 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 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) 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.

Sort of unrelated, but has anyone else noticed that there are a lot of subtitling errors in netflix shows recently? Two I noticed yesterday:

"natural world" -> "national world"

"cede power" -> "seed power"

I guess they're just machine transcribing it without oversight now?

This article badly needs an editor. Even though it's a topic I'm very interested in (and with the perspective of being semi-fluent in Japanese), it's so rambling and visually messy that I gave up halfway through.

Relevant discussion from a previous post. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45497900

> 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?

There is a solution: learn Japanese!

Tried watching some CR content on Amazon Prime. Unusable. The subs are garbage. Better quality from Netflix which is a freaking random host not even anime focused. Had to cancel the CR sub. Literally unwatchable