I’m confused as to the motive. From what the article says, soft captions are better for almost every use case?
That’s correct, i can only imagine it’s a cost cutting thing.
My guess is they want to stop maintaining their own custom video player that supports all sorts of features for soft captions.
What am I missing?
It would seem to me that Crunchyroll should prefer soft subs, since they require much less work and can be edited/updated/changed at any time. And it’s much easier and less costly to offer multiple languages, since they can just provide one video file and multiple sub files, rather than having to provide multiple videos.
And personally, I prefer hard subs - they’re no fuss, generally more dependably accurate (and accurately timed) and allow for more creativity, like strategic placement, multiple colors or fonts, deliberate variation in font size/kerning etc…
and allow for more creativity, like strategic placement, multiple colors or fonts, deliberate variation in font size/kerning etc…
Crunchyroll’s subtitle display system was actually really advanced and could do all this stuff anyways, making the move feel even stranger. My guess is they wanted to stop maintaining their own video player without dropping those capabilities.
I dunno… granted that I’m extremely cynical, that just doesn’t sound like corporate behavior. I would more expect CR to just count on exclusive licensing and the convenience of siccing governments on pirates to protect their market share from any possible ill effects of downgrading their player.
I mean - Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to specifically describe a process involving online platforms and a combination of private users and business customers, but really the broad process is common to pretty much every corporate product/service in existence, and undeniably including streaming services.
Again though, I’m extremely cynical…
I think you’re indeed being a little too cynical here. Enshittification happens because corps are trying to squeeze every cent they can out of everyone they interact with. It’s not like they’re going out of their way to make things worse; that’s just an incidental thing that happens sometimes when a guy with an MBA sees a cost he thinks can be cut. In this case I think the target was a relatively expensive development team; any changes to how much work is put into translation and localization would be a separate matter.
Also keep in mind that they have some terrifying rivals - Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+. Each of these rivals has solid offerings in the anime world, and each of them has a deep warchest they could pull from if they wanted to fight Crunchyroll for exclusives. Up 'til now one of the biggest reasons to have a Crunchyroll account over those others has been (believe it or not) the quality of the subtitles. For all of Crunchyroll’s mistakes, those others do it far worse. If Crunchyroll actually dropped their subtitle quality and got rid of features like typesetting I think they’d lose a lot of customers. Oh, and I guess HiDive also exists. They’ll need to make some serious upgrades such as “a video player that plays videos consistently” or “a next episode button that actually plays the next episode” before they can threaten Crunchyroll though.
Yeah - I’d have to say that I’m being too cynical, since I didn’t see anything there I’d disagree with.
And I hadn’t considered the scale of CR’s competition - that’s a good point.
But then we’re back to it not making sense…
Ah, you might be right about this. I hadn’t thought about them dropping support for the .ass sub format.
I think what is going on here is an anti-piracy measure. When subs are delivered in a separate stream in the browser, pirates with the proper tools can save them separately, making it easier to redistribute as a video file with a range of subtitle options. By hardcoding them, CR is basically making a prospective pirate’s redistribution life harder because they need to do a separate video for every sub language (or go to a different source).
I think the main thing that soft subs offers is that you can customize size/color options in the player. When they are hardsubs burned into the video, then you no longer have that ability.
That was my first thought, but it doesn’t seem to hold up. The only pirates I would think would be significantly inconvenienced are ones that are doing fansubs of languages CR doesn’t support. If it’s a language CR supports, then the only difference is that the pirates would offer hard subs instead of soft, and while yes, that does mean having to host multiple copies of the same video, each with their own hard subs, that seems more the sort of thing that CR wouldn’t do, since corporations will institute policies solely to save fractions of cents. Pirates, ironically enough, generally aren’t that greedy, so it seems they’d be more likely to just go ahead and host multiple copies of hard subbed videos if that’s what it takes, and that’s the way it goes.
Now that said, I had noticed over recent years that hard subs are increasingly rare and most sites only offer soft subs, but I just assumed that was because they were ripping them straight from the originals, while hard subs are still done the old fashioned way, by fansubbing groups. But I guess it’s possible that the fact that most of the pirates have gone to soft subs exclusively means it would be more of a hassle for them to handle hardsubs than I’m thinking it would be.
I dunno - it just seems odd, still.
And people still wonder why I pirate my series and keep my favs all in my hard disk, instead of “y bother lol? just subscribe to crânchi rou lmao”. It’s because of this sort of shit, or rather enshittification; I don’t want to deal with it at all, I trust streaming services as much as I trust cable TV (zero).
And this topic is specially relevant for me because I’m currently translating anime. And I can only do it because the video and subtitles can be separated; I don’t speak Japanese, so gotta work based on another subtitle, plus nobody wants to watch stuff with superimposed layers of subtitles.
because I’m currently translating anime
How does this work if you don’t speak Japanese? MTL? How can you be sure you’re doing a remotely decent job of it?
I’m retranslating the English subtitles into Portuguese (done) and Venetian (WIP).
I know this is dirty, and there’s no way I’d do it professionally (I’d simply refuse the job), or if this was some actual release. But given my goal is to allow my family to enjoy the series, that’s good enough. And context helps a lot, the series in question is Yoru wa Neko to Issho, you can get 90% of each episode by the animation alone.
Plus, well… weeb vocab helps a lot too. For example, you don’t need to speak Japanese to know what a “yame— ah!” means, as the cat drops a glass of water on the floor.
It’s not ideal, but I’d agree it’s a lot better than nothing.
JP -> EN
EN -> DE, ES, PT, etc.
might be different for anime, but at least that’s how it works in the sector I’m involved with. It’s a lot easier to get a translator for English into language X than getting one for Y to X. If I’m correct with my assumption for the anime pipeline, this would make it even more important to get high-quality EN translations that stay true to the source, since many other language translations will be derived from that.
Downside: Joke was lost in translation.
ay yo, what u get whun you pipe this?
说曹操, 曹操到
“Speak of the devil and he appears” (Literal translation: “Speak of Cao Cao, (and) Cao Cao arrives.”)
I know literal translation can’t work 100% of the time, but the cao cao version of that saying is way more fun and a good example of why we should strive to have subs/dubs be a accurate as possible. Getting the foreign culture is just so nice.
oh, it has idiom checks‽
Appreciate your work. I used to have a Crunchyroll and Hidive subscription before Hidive left and Crunchyroll used noticeably terrible and unchecked MTL subs (specifically The Yuzuki Family’s Four Sons, that was a complete mess. “Brother Falcon” still lives more in my head than the name of the series itself, so I searched “Cruncyroll Brother Falcon” to find the series name). Crunchyroll also constantly just kept missing their own release times, and there were multiple occasions before I ended my subscription where they just didn’t release the English subs as well, for example only having Spanish subs just after release. It’s just been so much better doing it this way.
Piracy wins yet again
With that said, subs are a pain in the ass (pun slightly intended). I wouldn’t be surprised if this was just someone’s hack to avoid a fuckton of work and edgecases in their new player.
They also AI generate some of their lesser known shows’ subtitles.
