Captions are broken everywhere, on streaming services but also blu-ray. The whole system seems incredibly poorly thought out.
Basically, you only get to chose two settings: captions on/off, and caption language.
Now, personally I think captions are very distracting and I prefer them off. However, some content is not completely in a language I can understand, so those parts need captions.
For example: I was watching a movie the other day where 99% of the movie was in English. However, there were a few short scenes where some characters spoke in Chinese. Since I can’t understand Chinese I had to stop the movie, rewind a bit, enable captions, re-watch the scene and then disable captions again. This happened several times during the movie.
It seems to me that the system could have been so much better with a tiny bit more metadata and some additional settings.
Simply let me select the following:
- Languages that I can understand when spoken.
- Caption language for parts that are not in one of the languages I can understand.
The only thing that is needed to implement this is to add a ‘source’ language tag to each captioned line. If the source language is one of those understood by the viewer then don’t display the caption.
Basically, you only get to chose two settings: captions on/off, and caption language.
Now, personally I think captions are very distracting and I prefer them off. However, some content is not completely in a language I can understand, so those parts need captions.
For example: I was watching a movie the other day where 99% of the movie was in English. However, there were a few short scenes where some characters spoke in Chinese. Since I can’t understand Chinese I had to stop the movie, rewind a bit, enable captions, re-watch the scene and then disable captions again. This happened several times during the movie.
It seems to me that the system could have been so much better with a tiny bit more metadata and some additional settings.
Simply let me select the following:
- Languages that I can understand when spoken.
- Caption language for parts that are not in one of the languages I can understand.
The only thing that is needed to implement this is to add a ‘source’ language tag to each captioned line. If the source language is one of those understood by the viewer then don’t display the caption.