20241212-captions.txt

I may have mentioned this before, but when I'm ripping movies, I often
end up modifying the subtitles, if only converting them from pictures
like PGS (Blu-rays) or Vobsubs (DVDs) to SRT (plain timed text).
There's a newer variant which I believe is SSA or ASS (kind of like
DivX and Xvid) that is a bit heavier but provides more options, but
editing those is a chore if you really want to customize. And for
future reference, though subtitles and captions are used
interchangeably, I refer to picture-based "text" as subtitles and
plain time text as captions. I mean that's basically how they're
defined anyway.

The most I'll do is reposition them: SRTs have prefixes to gravitate
the text to a certain sector, any combo of top, middle, and bottom and
left, center, and right. And that's only if I'm feeling really OCD
about things. I have a helper script to move text automatically if I
thing it will obscure other subtitles which weren't properly
separated. Captions default to bottom center, meaning if the movie has
burned in subtitles and captions that simultaneously appear, such as
"[SPEAKING GERMAN]", the default position would most likely obscure
the burnt-in English (in my case) translation.

Lucas' Star Wars DVDs/BDs actually do a proper job with subtitles: no
burning in and they are separated by language. They'll even provide
alternate language crawls (for my region, French and Spanish) as,
IIRC, different "angles," a DVD technology which provided a different
video stream that was rarely used. I only ever saw it used for
alternate language scrolls of text, usually at the beginning or end of
the movie (like credits) and once in a football DVD of Super Bowl
XXXII where it was actually used to provide different angles of the
play as well as different audio and trivia.

Most of my library is devoid of forced subtitles, and I've
standardized my media to not cater to GPhotos' lack of subtitle
support. It's weird because it pretty much reuses the YT video player
which DOES support captions, but I guess people aren't supposed to be
abusing the free video storage GPhotos provides to create a custom
streaming platform. I've since decided to re-encode my low-quality
versions to eliminate the burned-in captions that was the paradigm
previously. Thankfully there isn't a whole lot of repeat ripping
involved. My video library is probably too large for my own good, but
it's far from the worst habit one could have.

Anyway, I guess I'd just like to say I don't approve of burned-in
subtitles unless the medium like VHS) can't really handle multiple
subtitle tracks. Then again, VHS did support captions, but not all TVs
did. There's actually a good Technology Connections video about
captions in the early days of broadcast TV, which is pretty cool.