(Technology Connections) Closed captions on DVDs are getting left behind [33:46] (www.youtube.com)
from FenrirIII@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 27 May 19:42
https://lemmy.world/post/30351612

#technology

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potate@lemmy.ca on 27 May 20:21 next collapse

Legitimately one of my favourite YouTube channels. Tech deep dives (generally on extremely esoteric topics), sarcasm, and interesting insights.

cygnus@lemmy.ca on 27 May 21:44 collapse

Alec is also (unsurprisingly) on the Fedi: mas.to/@TechConnectify

SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de on 27 May 22:01 next collapse

kind of.

He mostly left because of bullying. Just posting video updates and rare posts.

MegaUltraChicken@lemmy.world on 27 May 22:26 next collapse

Who the fuck is bullying this guy? I will round up a goddamn posse, Alec is a treasure.

SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de on 27 May 22:39 collapse

Fediverse being fediverse.

For large accounts it’s a genuine toxic cesspit.

Scroll back to a year ago and you can regularly see posts from him where he calls people out.

small sample from just scrolling through:

mas.to/@TechConnectify/112995372890737651

mas.to/@TechConnectify/112995177480955078

But that’s just the stuff he openly shows

A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world on 28 May 03:48 collapse

Thats just social media.

Which is why social media shouldnt exist. cause its not good for anyones health.

SorteKanin@feddit.dk on 28 May 06:07 collapse

How is this bullying not moderated? That just seems weird. I’ve always felt Mastodon kinda fails at moderation in this aspect. He should go to Lemmy instead.

FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au on 28 May 09:50 collapse

Lemmy is bully central if you don’t just go with the echo chamber lol

LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 28 May 13:59 collapse

True.

spongebue@lemmy.world on 28 May 03:04 next collapse

His Bluesky is also a delight

Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 28 May 16:36 collapse

shouldnt it be @TechConnectify@mas.to ?

Weird. Doesnt work somehow…

Sixtyforce@sh.itjust.works on 27 May 21:04 next collapse

reads meta data 1st We gotta get Alec to show up on William’s chaos ranch for an episode of Farmer’s with Brain Damage. If anyone can get 1 million billion Sunflowers to grow in sand and not get eaten by Kevin’s dog it’ll be Alec.

Now I’ll watch the video. I’m sure it’s good. It’s always good.

edit: Yep. Interesting.

I think, it’s not very expensive or difficult to find work around solutions to the few people holding onto standard definition media.

chunkystyles@sopuli.xyz on 28 May 04:04 collapse

You’re taking about bringing a man of control and order into that den of chaos and goblinry? I don’t think Alec would enjoy it.

sevon@lemmy.kde.social on 27 May 21:19 next collapse

I like putting the thing in the thing

Me too.

FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au on 27 May 21:52 next collapse

DVDs have already been left behind so not much of an issue.

BowtiesAreCool@lemmy.world on 27 May 23:44 next collapse

Someone didn’t watch the video

FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au on 28 May 07:00 collapse

Correct, because anything related to DVDs as the title suggests is wholly irrelevant in 2025.

Watching now - I’m in PAL land so line 21 captions were never a thing for me.

CriticalMiss@lemmy.world on 28 May 04:16 collapse

You would be surprised but in the US DVDs are still king. They sell far better than regular BluRays and even better than 4K UHD BRs. So saying it’s dead is difficult.

taladar@sh.itjust.works on 28 May 08:10 next collapse

One format selling better than another dead format is hardly a useful data point.

CriticalMiss@lemmy.world on 28 May 13:31 collapse

It’s not really dead, but they’ve definitely scaled down their operations. With streaming services increasing their prices YoY I believe the return to physical media will be cheaper in some cases.

taladar@sh.itjust.works on 28 May 13:42 collapse

File based formats are just so much better than the shit formats with a specific type of media baked in like Audio CDs and Video DVDs and BR. Especially when those are combined with deliberate deviations from the standard for “copy protection” or with DRM.

Not to mention that you don’t have to give up the advantages of networks along with the disadvantages of streaming services. Files can be downloaded, uploaded and copied across the network just fine.

CriticalMiss@lemmy.world on 28 May 13:51 collapse

You’re preaching to the choir. That’s why we spend time making remuxes and encodes. But for release groups to make those we need the format to survive, because Hollywood won’t make the physical media if there’s no copy protection.

taladar@sh.itjust.works on 28 May 14:11 collapse

Hollywood seems to have invented the ultimate in copy protection in recent years anyway, making movies so bad nobody even wants to watch them. It is not used by 100% of movies yet but it is spreading.

FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au on 28 May 09:41 collapse

Blu-ray is dead too. It died even quicker. Both of their sales are circling the drain.

LastYearsIrritant@sopuli.xyz on 27 May 22:38 next collapse

Piracy has none of these problems.

Once again, playing by the rules is a worse experience.

CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 28 May 00:23 collapse

It really depends on the ripper. I’d say 9/10 times captions are included on most of my downloads.

It’s that 10th one that is super annoying and I have to wait for jellyfin to download them one by one from open subtitles.

veroxii@aussie.zone on 28 May 02:27 next collapse

And the downloaded ones are never in sync properly.

Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 28 May 16:35 collapse

That’s on you for loading the wrong kind.

Bademantel@lemmy.world on 28 May 03:40 next collapse

If you run your own server you can have a look at bazarr.

CriticalMiss@lemmy.world on 28 May 04:14 next collapse

As a ripper myself for one of the internal groups, both DVDs and Blu rays have this annoying thing where they include the subtitles in image format (PGS for BRs, forgot what the DVD one was). It’s a headache for the rippers and encoders because we then need to OCR the subtitles for the encodes we put out there. Sometimes if we get lucky the movie is on a streaming platform making this process obsolete as we grab the .vtt files from the streaming service and sync it with the BR we’re making (as well as transforming it to .srt) . My only assumption as to why MPAA decided on image format subs for both DVDs and BRs is because it makes it easy to deal with different languages and the likes, you just display a static image and fk everything else. But for the people putting out quality releases if we ship PGS that means we’re just doing a bad job.

Support your fav trackers (and their internals!)

GhostlyPixel@lemmy.world on 28 May 05:21 next collapse

I rip for my personal collection/data hoarding and was surprised to learn how much of a pain PSG subs are. I figured I just had HandBrake configured wrong until I started looking into it.

CriticalMiss@lemmy.world on 28 May 05:53 collapse

Yeah, really makes you wonder if it’s by design as some sort of evil anti piracy measure.

Landless2029@lemmy.world on 28 May 08:12 next collapse

Unsung hero right here.

flightyhobler@lemmy.world on 28 May 09:36 next collapse

I spent my college days ripping and manually correcting OCR’d subtitles for more movies than I care to count in the early 2000s. Do you mean to say I could have monetized it?

Also, fuck lower case Ls and upper case is

CriticalMiss@lemmy.world on 28 May 13:24 collapse

Highly doubt you can monetize it. Most groups do it as a hobby because they care about preservation. Internal groups don’t lack the time or storage space. What we do lack is dedicated BluRay rippers from distant regions.

LastYearsIrritant@sopuli.xyz on 28 May 10:51 next collapse

Oh damn, I had no idea that’s why a lot of movies had OCR issues with my subtitles. I knew the information, and I had this problem, but I never put it together to realize that it had to be OCRd.

Dempf@lemmy.zip on 28 May 13:43 next collapse

Thank you for your service.

Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 28 May 16:33 collapse

dvd should be VOBSUB

FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au on 28 May 09:49 collapse

Have a look at Bazarr.

neclimdul@lemmy.world on 28 May 00:19 next collapse

After watching his video it feels like it was already left behind.

chunkystyles@sopuli.xyz on 28 May 04:05 collapse

What is the “it” that you think got left behind?

taladar@sh.itjust.works on 28 May 08:09 next collapse

Honestly, physical media formats in general have been left behind decades ago at this point.

neclimdul@lemmy.world on 28 May 15:34 collapse

I meant that in the video it’s consistently not worked for a very long time. Seems the switch to HDMI left it behind. While it would be nice if devices supported it like he asked, the fact it was skipped in the HDMI standard and not mandated by law means it’s unlikely devices racing too the bottom line will ever care. And that’s basically what we see. Only the most expensive devices even acknowledge it’s an issue.

That said, I hope VLC devs see his video and improve things. I’m sure it’s more complicated then it seems but it would be cool for them to add that to the ways they’re better than every other player put there.

ABetterTomorrow@lemm.ee on 28 May 00:42 next collapse

DVDs are getting left behind.

A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world on 28 May 03:46 next collapse

30 years old next year 😭

MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml on 28 May 10:01 collapse

DVD’s are getting old. Rate of degradation due to manufacturing inperfections is about 1:10 in public library.

realitista@lemm.ee on 28 May 09:15 next collapse

All my DVD’s stopped working when I moved to another country anyway.

JcbAzPx@lemmy.world on 28 May 18:55 collapse

There are non-region locked DVD players.

realitista@lemm.ee on 28 May 22:04 next collapse

I did have one for a while but it broke and DVD isn’t really high enough quality to watch any more anyway. Though I do feel like my PlayStation should play them which it doesn’t.

janNatan@lemmy.ml on 28 May 22:53 collapse

Blu Ray players too. I have a Sony BPX 370, and it will play any (non 3D or 4k) Blu Ray or DVD from anywhere in the world.

Squizzy@lemmy.world on 28 May 09:36 next collapse

These videos are really interesting but sometimes I really wish they were more concise. I know its his whole thing but damn I want the knowledge.

FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au on 28 May 09:48 next collapse

Yeh that half hour video could have been 5 minutes. Never seen him before but enjoyed his style and how he explains things, but it felt like he said the same thing over and over again 6 times.

Squizzy@lemmy.world on 28 May 11:13 collapse

I enjoy his work but it can get excessively long winded at times. Not necessarily five minutes but tighter for sure.

uniquethrowagay@feddit.org on 28 May 11:59 collapse

How else could you somehow talk about heat pumps in a completely unrelated video if it wasn’t a little too long winded?

warbond@lemmy.world on 28 May 11:11 next collapse

It’s not just the information for me, he’s also passionate about the stuff that he explores and that comes across in his videos.

Squizzy@lemmy.world on 28 May 11:12 collapse

Abaolutely, but I have other things to do I end not getting to watch them

toynbee@lemmy.world on 29 May 14:25 collapse

In those situations I usually enable 1.5x.

TheRealKuni@midwest.social on 28 May 13:44 collapse

I kind of love that about his videos. I scoff at the time, but then start the video and next thing I know it’s a half hour later and I’ve learned something in a surprising amount of depth.

I like a world where not everything needs to be 5 minute videos. Some things can be longer form.

Squizzy@lemmy.world on 28 May 19:14 collapse

Very fair, this comment is likely a result of me not being able to do that this week. But I have ploughed through hours of dishwashers, EV brakes and rice cookers in a day before.

MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml on 28 May 10:00 next collapse

There’s two parts to this; the dvd player and the video player in the TV (or if it’s a HDMI player, in the players firmware).

SpaceScotsman@startrek.website on 28 May 10:46 next collapse

I’m surprised VLC fares that badly with CCs encoded this way. Usually it’s pretty good. I’m also now wondering if ffmpeg also shares the same problem

LorIps@lemmy.world on 28 May 12:09 next collapse

Because of the way those captions are stored VLC has to use OCR to convert the .SRT file (which basically stores low resolution b/w images I assume to easier allow for different alphabets) to normal text. I don’t know why the open source solutions are so bad at this (especially considering how good the proprietary solutions seem to be) but I had similar problems ripping a DVD. I would assume that had he turned off the special font VLC uses for the subtitles and instead just seen the raw data there wouldn’t have been a problem. Why VLC doesn’t enable this by default (/ have this) I don’t know.

kaknife@lemmy.world on 28 May 17:33 next collapse

This is not about DVD subtitles, which are images as you say. This is about “Line 21” closed captioning. I.E. the text data that is embedded in an analog tv signal. There should be no OCR needed.

GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml on 28 May 17:50 collapse

There is no .srt in this case. This is also not about bitmap dvd vobsubs.

a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 29 May 07:40 collapse

The top Youtube comment by Ridley Combs explains it pretty well:

FFmpeg maintainer here, and the details behind the caption decoding issues you’re seeing in VLC are complex and horrific. They largely stem from how the EIA-608 caption format expects text to be laid out in a monospace grid onscreen, which isn’t really how the text rendering stacks used for modern subtitling work (this is probably why changing the font caused problems on those Sony players); beyond that, the behavior can just end up pretty complex, and there’s no convenient public-domain corpus of sample files for open-source software developers to test against. These kinds of issues also affect the Japanese (ARIB) and European (Teletext) formats to varying extents. These days, a lot of the focus ends up being on converting the text into modern Unicode text formats, styled using modern techniques, so direct rendering of the legacy formats hasn’t had as much attention lately.

cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 28 May 11:10 next collapse

ownership of media is getting left behind.

LodeMike@lemmy.today on 28 May 17:24 next collapse

🏴‍☠️

Joelk111@lemmy.world on 28 May 18:28 collapse

Legal ownership, that is

But_my_mom_says_im_cool@lemmy.world on 28 May 18:06 collapse

Man I remember when dvds were a new thing. The sixth sense was the first dvd I ever bought. dvds used to have interactive menus, Easter eggs, multiple behind the scenes documentaries and videos, photos and info on the production. Now you buy a blu ray and it goes straight to the movie, no menu, no features, no bts footage, just the movie and nothing else.

thermal_shock@lemmy.world on 29 May 11:20 collapse

Got to get the special edition for that extra $tuff.