That's how it starts, then a show doesn't feel right without subs

o_O TIL thanks.

^Hey, let me tell you this secret. Ellen is gonna^

KABOOM

I watched 28 Weeks Later last week, on my 5.1 system, and the mixing was absolutely atrocious. I was constantly adjusting the volume up to hear dialogue, only for a loud as fuck jump scare to blast out my ear drums.

Completely ruined any enjoyment I would have gotten from it.

I believe some TVs report that they have surround sound to streaming services despite really only having Stereo. On some services like Prime and (I think) Netflix you can manually choose the audio track. Give it a shot. It's not perfect, but it helps a good bit.

You can usually set both speed and offset of subtitles. Set both to default, time the first line correctly with offset, go one hour in, time this line correctly with speed. Takes some fiddling, but beats having to stop the movie every 5 minutes.

I wonder if someone could make an ADA or CVAA complaint on that basis? Technically the dub isn't matching the captions, and as a result, someone who is hard of hearing isn't getting the same experience. Someone who is completely deaf won't have a bad experience, but someone who has a disability where they can't hear very well, or have problems comprehending spoken words might have a problem.

YESSS. Cells at Work on Netflix had this problem and I couldn't get past it. Why can't they just have two sets of subtitles and dynamically pick? Or even just like them both. Some content already has "Subtitles" and "Closed Captioning" separately. (Subtitles only has dialogue, closed captioning has sounds as well.)

This happened when I decided to practice language by using the audio/subtitle options on Netflix. I ended up getting annoyed by the Spanish subtitles and spoken Spanish being different, and I couldn't do both simultaneously.

Btw, some of the puns on Spanish-language Bojack Horseman are even better than the originals. The translation team must have been masters to be that on-point, consistently, throughout a show that practically breathes puns. (Well, puns and tragedy.)

Had this happen recently with Death Note. I kept seeing memes about the fuckin show so I watched a synopsis of it. I thought "Well that ending is stupid. I'll never watch it."

5 hours later I found myself on the third episode like "Huh?"

But I digress. I turned on the subtitles and was driven batshit insane. Wasn't worth the effort of trying to find ones that matched. Everything was the same gist but the wrong wording and I was losing my mind.

Even worse, you've got 2 autistic children that lose their minds every time the subtitles don't match or are poorly translated or whatever, and loudly exclaim over the next 10-15 seconds of the show (unless interrupted by another poorly matching subtitle).

Unless you have dubtitles

VLC has an option...

If you click "Tools" then "Track Synchronization" it allows you to delay or... speed up? Whatever the opposite of delay is... the audio by fractions of a second. A godsend. So many things would have been unwatchable otherwise.

Seems like it also has a similar option for syncing up subtitles but I haven't used that.

I haven't worked in the field, but oh boy do I ever notice it. Is it the player? The display? The receiver? I don't know, and I will fuck with it until it's tolerable... and then something drifts and I'm clawing at the walls again. Yes, something in my setup sucks, but the gear is all from ~2017 and I'm broke. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My Xbox is connected to the 1080p/low latency HDMI port on my display, with the audio going over optical directly to my receiver, stereo only, foregoing 4K and surround sound for the express purpose of playing Rock Band with as little latency as possible. The two types of guitar and the drum set have slightly different optimal calibration settings in the game. The whole reason I bought a 360 over a PS3 back in the day was that the guitars were still wired, and trying to calibrate while playing on my friend's PS3 was next to impossible and spawned a lot of arguments.

Today, that same friend contentedly watches content 1/4-1/2 second out of sync. And his wife prefers watching everything with subtitles. So I have to actively ignore both distractions and pretend everything's fine to be a good friend. 🫠

Oh I hate that' Almost worse than no subs'

I'm pretty sure poor sound balance in modern media is mandatory.

Please explain to me how "training my hearing" will change the fact that my broken-ass brain fucking struggles to process spoken language. Subtitles are an accessibility thing, not a luxury thing done for shits and giggles.

Also remember that there are people on this planet who are legitimately hard of hearing.

You miss so much about the composition of a shot when you’re reading subtitles.

After a while, you really don't... You eventually stop even realizing that you're reading.

Also, the art thing you're describing is something completely different than subtitles. That's called "audio description" and it is a real thing that exists for people with vision problems.

There are plenty of reasons for people to use subtitles that don't come down to poor hearing. I find a lot of TV and movies from Spain or France have really crap sound, for example, where dialogue is practically a whisper. I speak Spanish fluently and use it at work without issue for 40 hours a week, yet have an easier time understanding death metal lyrics than dialogue in some films and shows, for example. Somehow, Brazil figured out better sound design than most productions in either of those two countries, and I can watch Brazilian shows and films without having to turn on subtitles just fine.

You also have assholes like Christopher Nolan, who insist on mixes that result in sound effects blowing out your ear drums before you can actually make out the dialogue, despite it being spoken in my native English.

On the other hand, I find background noise much more disruptive to my comprehension in languages other than English, and would hardly be surprised if the same were true for those who speak English as a second language.

Also, I guess by your logic, people who are deaf or hard of hearing should just accept that they can never fully appreciate this sort of media, due to relying on closed captioning.

All around, it's just an incredibly ignorant comment.

The idea of playing a narrative game without subtitles gives me anxiety lol

For some reason, Amazon Prime randomly has German subtitles turned on for me.