[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?

[piperswe]

ASS can have frame-by-frame animation IIRC, so a stream of PNGs could end up being quite high bitrate with high complexity files

[Mindwipe]

It is harder than you think and will break on many more devices than you think.