[xiii1408]

Yes! My perennial problem is that most Chinese TV content has excellent subtitles, but they're burned in to the videos. So if I want to watch a Chinese show with a friend who doesn't read Chinese, there's no option even for auto-translated subtitles. I've often thought of writing a script to generate subtitle files using text recognition, but haven't gotten around to it.

[throw_away]

Ah, but one thing I miss about the burned-in subtitles was how, on VHS at least, one could fast forward like 2-3x and still be able to read the captions. I double-lazied my way out of more than one high school book review where a boring book was made into a boring movie.

[crtasm]

But now we can do the same thing with softsubs, e.g. using VLC.

[xiii1408]

There's also the problem of content which doesn't have subtitles to begin with---YouTube's automatic subtitle generation is great, but could be improved and expanded to languages other than English.

[moffkalast]

> YouTubes auto mathy subtitle gen ration is grate

FTFY

[danuker]

Nah, it's better than that. But it doesn't recognize sentences, and a word appears at a time.

[BlueTemplar]

Sadly, they seem instead to have been recently removing this functionality (as well as auto-translation of those).

[Jach]

It is expanded, at least to Japanese. What's also fun is you can then have it auto translate the auto generated subs. The results are... not typically great, but the potential!

[userbinator]

A long time ago, I tried the "autosub" feature with anime and it replaced understanding with unintentional (dry) humour. The output had phrases that resembled a news transcript, which is probably what they were training the system on.