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As someone learning Norwegian, I am often in this picture
It’s not even like I can’t hear or anything. It’s just sound mixing is terrible.
It really is amazing to me how subtitles have become the norm. Everyone I know uses them. And it’s all cause the audio is just trash. No matter the audio setup. Expensive atmos surround sound, entry level sound bar, Sonos whatever, tv speakers. They all sound like shit and everyone uses subtitles.
I have noticed those who use subtitles all the time speak less clearly themselves and have trouble with understanding accents.
If subtitles are so great, why aren’t there any supertitles yet?
Supertitles are in opera or theatre where they show translated text on a screen above the stage.
Wait… Is this a real thing?
I’m not rich enough to have ever been to the Opera
I don’t go to Opera either because I’m a cheapskate, but these things do exist.
Burn, forced, ASS… subtitles are great, but what about domtitles?
Top tip, if you use VLC or some such software, they often have a compressor plug in (if the software you are using, doesn’t have one, get VLC). Compressor will take care of limiting giant explosions and other loud noises so you can have the volume set to a level where you can hear the speaking parts.
https://www.geekality.net/blog/settings-for-vlc-dynamic-range-compression
Though this is not a magic trick, I still use (English) subtitles, mainly because I’m not a native English speaker and sometimes I mishear words and such.
Night mode does the same thing on your TV, or sound bar/system.
Interesting, thanks for the tip. I’ll have to check if my dad’s TV has that. He’s been complaining about the sound levels.
Does this work on the funny android smart TV versions of vlc? The layout is so different to what I am used to on my PC.
I don’t know. If it has the compressor plugin, should work.
While volume leveling helps in a lot of cases, it frequently makes the sound all wonky and weird as a tradeoff for the improved voice clarity. Lots of clipping and other things that also came up in the loudness wars for music.
I havent had any issues. Though I tend to watch stuff with mild volume levels.
It clips at mild levels too, even if you don’t notice it.
Ohhhh, that’s really useful, thank you!
Indeed! Improved my movie watching experiences immensely.
I speak English, I’m from the US, and I use subtitles anytime there’s British people. Australians too. It’s essentially a different language.
I’ve been watching so much UK TV/movies that I can understand their accents quite well. Aussie accents too, but they have their own slang words that I sometimes struggle with, but nothing a little internet search cant fix.
Whispers: Fuck. Yes. Thanks.💥 🤯 💣 🧨 💣 🤯 💥
If a motherfucker could properly mix audio I wouldn’t need them.
If I wouldn’t have to turn the volume ALL THE WAY UP followed by ALL THE WAY DOWN because your show/movie can’t decide if we’re whispering or blowing the planet up every ten seconds, I wouldn’t need them.
“Yeah well, it sounds perfect in my soundproof bunker on my $10,000 cans, I don’t know why you think Inwould test the sound out in a cluttered living room setting on a $300 TV with no surround sound.”
– Average Present Day Audio Engineer
At least some of those audio engineers go home everyday to listen on their $300 Roku TV so it really makes no sense. I know some.
Audio Engineering is not some lofty high-paying profession.
They often claim you need a proper audio setup.
I have an expensive (be it old) surround sound setup. Marvel and many other modern movies suck absolute arse. Having to pause and fiddle with volume going from a barely audible conversation to deafening noise in a single scene.
Fuck that noise, audio seems optimized for smartphone speakers nowadays.
Fuck that noise, audio seems optimized for smartphone speakers nowadays.
No, it’s optimized for 42-speaker, billion-watt Imax screens. Where I have to wear earplugs.
We went to the re-airing of interstellar on imax. The sound when the ship was getting hammered with hail was so loud my ears were ringing and we left. Making movies painful should not be the point.
But it really makes you feel like
SpidermanYou have tinnitus
What if, hear me out, they changed the format a bit to supply 2 separate audio tracks. One for voice, one for effects. Then we could adjust it ourselves.
They kinda do that with surround. Dialogue is mostly isolated to the center speaker.
Which is why it sounds bad, because 99% of the audience is watching on a stereo TV they got at Wal-mart.
I’d vote for you
Boost your center channel and/or enable dialogue enhancer.
Won’t help with Marvel movies (their mixing sucks ass) but most others.
Let me find the center channel setting on my two speaker stereo real quick.
Movies from the 90s and prior sound perfectly fine even with loud explosions and whispers and a large dynamic range. Today’s mixes are just straight up dog shit.
Kodi power.
This would be amusing in japanese <-> English as the word order is roughly opposite. There are a few implementation strategies that are varying degrees of trash
On the bright side: I don’t spoil the video myself because i read too fast
On the bad side: JESUS CHRIST I WANNA READ, MY BRAIN CAN’T BEAR YOUR SLOWNESS
*rarely the case but if i have subtitles that’s the reason, either that or the speak has a strong Bri’ish🍵 or Freedom 🦅🦅🦅 accent
I read so fast that with long subtitles I have too much time to think about me being useless
that guy is, ttbomk, mr beast. bring out the guillotine.
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I wanted to turn them off and learned that you can’t on Chrunchyroll
Sometimes crunchyroll will play the closed captions on the closed captions track. In those cases, you have to turn subtitles off at the TV level for it to turn off, since there’s no option on crunchyroll for it.
Huhu? Like is there a problem with their interface that prevents that? Because most of my anime is CR rips and they never have hardsubs.
You can’t turn them off for the Japanese dub of some series. CR states that this is expected and due to licensing constrains
And occasionlly, the sub and the dub are NOT THE SAME.
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This is torture if the subtitles don’t match.
I have a soft spot for dubbed anime and always have, but in pretty much every case, the subtitles are not a transcript of the dub, they’re a translation of the original Japanese.
As a result, the feeling you get trying to watch that is not unlike going up a set of stairs and miscounting, but for every sentence.
It’s like following two different stories at once!
If you want the subtitles to match the dub you have to specifically look for dubtitles or CC. But they are rather rare.
AI generated subtitles are utter garbage. Combine that with idiots who can’t be bothered to check their 60 second long video for mistakes and you basically end up with subtitles that have no reason of being there in the first place
It’s also torture if the subtitles don’t (reasonably) match for non-dubbed content.
This bothers me more with captioning for English language movies in English. They abbreviate a lot to make it easier to quickly read what is being said. Sometimes that makes perfect sense and is very useful. A lot of the time, they’re just cutting out details for no good reason.
It’s also very annoying for non-native speakers who want to listen to the original audio and have the subtitles as help when they don’t understand something:
- what was that one word I didn’t get?
- subtitles: completely different sentence (with the same meaning, OK, but different words)
I prefer just listening to it in Japanese, but even knowing just basic Japanese you start seeing inaccurate translations in the subtitles too (especially with cussing).
I’m with you on that. Anime has to have dubtitles if I’m putting them on there. Thankfully you can find those pretty easily these days if you need to.
When and why did this become a thing? Half the people I know are like this
It’s a vicious circle, these past twenty years. Before then, movie makers made effort to ensure dialog could be heard and understood. There’s a line in Casino Royal that James mumbles, “He’s a bloody idiot, then”, but you can still understand him, it’s meant to be mumbled, Eva Greene asks “What?”, but he’s understandable when he’s acting like he’s mumbling. They wouldn’t even make him unintelligible for a line that was meant to be unintelligible.
Without subtitles, when I don’t have them for whatever reason, sometimes I need to rewind, and turn up the volume to catch a single word the actor mumbled. Sometimes, I never hear what they said, and I just move on. Was that important? I don’t know.
We started watching with subtitles because we couldn’t hear what the actors are saying.
“Big explosions go boom, everyone likes loud music.”
Actors don’t need to speak clearly, which adds “atmosphere” or whatever, because everyone is watching with subtitles.
When media with optional subtitles became a thing? When my parents got a DVD player
It always had been like this. Before subtitles became commonplace, we just straight up didn’t hear half of the words and suffered in solitude.
I found this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYJtb2YXae8
So it’s layered and complex.
[Ominous music]
[Inhuman snarls]
Probably my favorite one that I’ve seen
[speaking in a foreign language]
I love it when the show puts the foreign language subtitles in the show, and the [SPEAKING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE] covers up the original subtitles.
Or the original subtitles for some reason are not present when you turn on closed captions.
Like sometimes the "[Speaking in foreign language] is intentional, there is a plot element mystery because the other characters are not meant to understand it, so we, the audience are not meant to.
Also tangential that gets me, when it says like [Soeaking in Tagalog] or something specific, but less common, then later some character is like, “Si senor” in very obviously Spanish and it says [Speaking in foreign language]. Instead of [Speaking in Spanish].
I love it when the subtitle says the name of the song playing. I’ve learned a few tunes that I enjoy this way!
[🎵Singing🎵]
[music stops]
Sometimes the music adjectives make me laugh
[Uplifting music]
If you’re gonna talk about me behind my back, I’m gonna steal your meme!
Me when I was watching eng language films to learn the language. The hardest part was to let the subs go.
UK English is easy for me to go without subs. American English though, bunch of mumblers.
As an American, I mumble mumble mumble…
about 2/3 of any english accents sound like a different language if I don’t FOCUS.
For me is the opposite, northern accents from UK are like the hard mode.
You would probably benefit from a soundbar with center channel speaker.
That helps a bit but doesn’t fix studios not remixing audio properly from the theater mix to home audio where the majority of people have basic stereo. No excuse since every physical format and online service supports multiple audio streams.
I’ve got full 5.1 surround and subtitles are crucial.
Tenet. No matter how good your sound system, Nolan requires subtitles.
Not like they’ll help the movie make sense anyway.
Some of us just can’t hear properly.
Doesn’t matter, if the actor got heavy accent or they’re whispering, it help so much. It also doesn’t disturb the neighbours.
So I thought, but I’m still a remote jockey, constantly bouncing between gunshots, scene-setting music, and whispered dialogue.
But when the sub and the audio are two different languages that you understand it’s like hearing two voices and you have to silence one of them.
I find that a lobotomy helps and then covering one eye and the ear on the same side (since the optical nerves cross) so you can follow both independently.
Peer review
