[afishhh]

> I will mention that youtube has pretty good subtitle capabilities, even if they're rarely used.

Yep, their srv3 format is very usable, although it is in many ways inferior to ASS (animations have to be done manually in discrete timesteps, although YTSubConverter does that for you I think, and no crazy stuff like shape drawing or 3d transforms). Does support ruby text though which ASS currently doesn't.

I think the worst thing about it is actually that YouTube is not doing very well in getting people to use it. For example they don't support most of the format's functionality in any client that isn't the web one[1]. Additionally I don't think there's even an official way to create these complex subtitles, you have to use unofficial tools like YTSubConverter.

If anyone is interested, I am working on a library for rendering srv3 (and some WebVTT) here[2]. Maybe if we had widespread support people would use it more? That seems like very wishful thinking though :)

[1] I suspect this is because they have to work within the constraints of whatever UI frameworks they're using for apps. It does not seem possible to implement compliant web text layout (pretty complicated!) on top of such higher level systems.

[2] https://github.com/afishhh/subrandr