[Daiz]

This is the result of a ton of research into Crunchyroll's recent subtitle changes that have tanked the service's first-party presentation quality to an all-time low. The article ended up being quite long, so I highly appreciate anyone taking the time to read it in full!

[gblargg]

I didn't find an answer skimming: are they actively deleting old good subtitles and replacing with low-quality ones (as the title seems to suggest), have they simply changed their process for new subtitles, not spending as much to make nice ones? If they're actively deleting old good ones, that seems malicious.

[Daiz]

I did find instances of them actively deleting old subtitles and replacing them with lower quality ones in the back catalog, yes. Which seems indicative of Crunchyroll wanting to eventually get rid of good subtitles altogether.

[transcriptase]

What possible incentive could they have for doing this?

[virtue3]

I worked at crunchyroll.

Keeping the "hard subs" content is a lot of videos as the subtitles were encoded into the video stream.

This makes CDNs and other systems more difficult to utilize because we have a ton of video streams with just caption changes as opposed to just the Japanese audio source + caption files.

It's one of those things that doesn't seem that problematic till you include all the video_qualities to support streaming bandwith. So you also get a #hardSubLanguages * #videoQualities

[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.

[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.

[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.

[jonhohle]

What reason would there be for removing old, loved subtitles? Licensing fees?

[Daiz]

Crunchyroll is currently using a subtitle rendering stack that is highly unique in the media industry, being based on the Advanced SubStation Alpha (ASS) subtitle format. It seems that the current executives would like to replace this unique stack with something more "industry standard" (and far less capable), but they can't do that as long as their back catalog is full of ASS subtitles - if they just switched stacks without doing anything else, all of these back catalog subtitles would just stop working completely. Which is why in order to perform such a stack switch, all old subtitles would need to be replaced with worse ones to make them compatible with the less capable new stack.

[btown]

Per the article, on top of this, the Crunchyroll subtitle authoring tools and the Crunchyroll player both use ASS. So the directive to have the “master” copy be the more widespread and limited TTML… means that many new shows are doing ASS-to-TTML-to-ASS conversions! Quite literally the lowest common denominator of shared functionality.

[amarant]

Well the subtitles are ASS, alright, I'll give em that!

[lazystar]

who in the world thought that a .ass file extension would be a good idea, sigh.

https://fileformats.fandom.com/wiki/SubStation_Alpha

[Crespyl]

IIUC, it comes down to simplifying playback/subtitle rendering to the lowest common denominator among the various western streaming platforms.

The good/old subtitles in the ASS format required a more complex playback system than what Netflix/Hulu (and maybe blueray players) currently offer. This could be worked around by burning the subs into the video stream, but then you need to keep separate copies of your (large) video files for each subtitled language.

That doesn't seem like it'd be such a huge problem to me, but what do I know?

The post does a good job explaining the effective monopoly system at play that prevents real competition to provide any pressure to improve or maintain the prior quality.

[ramses0]

It's an X*N*N problem: n_videos, bitrates, formats.

Assuming each video in its largest bitrate is... 2gb for example, and assuming S3 is $0.025/gb, that's a nickle per month or let's say $0.50/yr for that video.

Next up is reduced bitrates, assume you go from 2gb to 1gb and finally 500mb. Round up and you're at $1/video.

Now duplicate it to AV1 and MP4, and multiply that by English, French, and Spanish (oh, and let's say Japanese and Chinese too for good measure).

So a single 2gb video goes from $1/yr to $10/yr, and you're not doing "the dumb simple thing" for subtitles which would basically 4x your cost over "commodity subtitling services".

Or "simplify, simplify simplify", you reduce costs (cha-ching!), and become compatible for syndication or redistribution (cha-ching!)

... and they would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for those meddling kids!

[charcircuit]

S3 is >100x more expensive than hosting it yourself. You shouldn't argue about things being expensive using cloud prices.

[pohuing]

Except ASS streams really aren't that big and don't have to be stored with each encode. They can just be in a separate file. And this is how cr used to serve them. Before they used hardware drm you could just download all of the separate sub tracks.

You don't need to multiply anything here, except the number of sub streams. One is ass, the other the primitive standards Netflix and other surges use.

[dylan604]

Lots of old CR content was fan subs which may or may not have followed any kind of "best practices". It was also a reason that CR struggled with legitimacy with the studios in the early days. They tried to remove content once a US company licensed a show as way to show they weren't pirates, but the friction was always there.

[underlipton]

Without knowing for sure, a conceivable strategy would be making it so that users who don't know that "good subs" can exist more readily accept "bad subs" as the standard. Same playbook as Google lobotomizing search and the index that search can access because that traditional search product is more efficacious than Gemini, which Google is trying to push on users.

[tmtvl]

Does Netflix really only allow 2 lines of subtitling on screen at a time? That's really stupid.

Also I remember when CR killed the Kodi plugin, that irked me enough to stick to DVD imports + fan subs for a while.

Finally, Ruri Rocks is such a good show, it got me to resubscribe to CR after not having subbed for years. If they screw with its subs I'm gonna root for this mess to bankrupt CR for good.

[Daiz]

See for yourself: https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/215...

> 4. Line Treatment

> 2 lines maximum

[makeitdouble]

> Ruri Rocks

This could be the toughest show to sub with all the geological explaination and jargon the adapter must be familiar with.

Adding to that the line limit, The bar to cross sounds quite hard.

[itpcc]

Not to mention the whole informative slideshow between the scene.Can't imagine how can they achieve that with only 2 lines.

[voidUpdate]

Do you know if there are plans to dub it at some point? I was looking forward to watching it, but I prefer dubs to subs (yes I know I'm weird)

[askl]

> Finally, Ruri Rocks is such a good show

I only had time to skim the article, so adding this show to my to-do list has been my main takeaway so far.

[ashirviskas]

Never used Crunchyroll, but this is a pretty interesting read! Did not finish it yet though.

I see you doing a ton of styling, which makes it a very pleasant reading experience, may I ask what techniques do you use? Is cyan just to replace bold or something else?

[Daiz]

The cyan is basically just bold, but also a highlighter. I was using just plain bold initially but started experimenting with it and landed on this. Pairs quite nicely with the pink links, IMO.

[JumpCrisscross]

> that have tanked the service's first-party presentation quality to an all-time low

Would you pirate for better subtitles? Assuming Crunchroll has the legal rights to the content pinned down, that may be the only way to apply legitimate pressure.

[Citizen_Lame]

Irony is Crunchyroll, started as a pirate service.

[jack_tripper]

So did Spotify.

[Suppafly]

One thing I've noticed is that they outright refuse to let you pick english audio and english subs, despite the audio and the subs being two different settings that theoretically should be independent of each other.