[khamidou]

Obviously you probably thought about it but what about rendering the subtitles on top of the video stream? Was there a reason it was not possible (e.g DRMs?)

[Daiz]

This kind of softsubbing is what Crunchyroll primarily does, but it has hardsubbed encodes for devices that cannot do softsubbed rendering of the ASS subtitles that Crunchyroll uses. I go over some ways in how they could do away with these hardsubbed variants in the article without any notable loss in primary experience quality.

[notpushkin]

They could borrow a trick from Netflix mentioned elsewhere in this thread: https://netflixsubs.app/docs/netflix/features/imgsub

I’m pretty sure it’s not too hard to implement an ASS → PNG renderer (especially considering vibe coding is now a thing). Then, just need to split out subs that can be actual text somehow from the ones that have to be overlays.

Apart from that... surely they could at least keep ASS subs for the players that support it, and serve “fallback” subs for low-end devices?

[dylan604]

If you hardsub the video, then you need to have a full copy of the video for every language. That's the opposite of what people want. They want a single textless video source that can then accommodate any internationalization.

[jamesgeck0]

The article claims that you can slice up the video and only use language-specific hardsubs for parts that need it. I'd be interested if there are technical reasons that can't be done.

[birksherty]

This is just an excuse. There needs to be a hard english sub and then keep other languages can be single video with different text file. Deleting 80% good things only to keep other 20% happy should not be an excuse.

Only english is the most popular and just keep it. Most of the good hard subs are made for english and that is what people want.

[virtue3]

Guess how well supported soft subs are on smartTVs etc? :)

It's really tough when you need to scale these things across 20 platforms.