Daiz

Yes, I know the format supports it. The question is, will hardware decoders built primarily around video use cases? And if those kind of hardware decoders end up forming the majority of hardware decoders for AVIF, will we end up in a future where using the full range of the format is heavily discouraged because it won't be supported by hardware decoders?

For comparison, it was possible to do 10-bit video with H.264, but 10-bit video didn't see any mainstream adoption with it because hardware decoders generally didn't support 10-bit H.264 video. Only when newer formats came around and specced 10-bit support as a baseline necessity did we start to see wider adoption for it. And well, the baseline specs (main profile) for AV1, which AVIF is based on, are limited to 4:2:0...

A potentially major issue I have with AVIF is that because it is based on a video format, any hardware decoding support AVIF will get is likely to be restrained to common video scenarios. This can result in eg. only 4:2:0 YUV being supported by hardware decoders, as that's the upper limit of AV1 Main Profile (and thus the limit of AVIF Baseline Profile). And 4:2:0 is just a poor fit for certain categories of images (like various kinds of illustrations, screenshots, etc). I would not be very happy about a web where lossy 4:4:4 image compression would be heavily discouraged with modern formats.

Also, good lossless compression absolutely does matter for the web as well. Lossy images just cannot be used in all circumstances - like when comparing compression quality (especially of videos), for example!

EDIT: To give an additional example, pixel art is an entire field of art (which is very much still active today) where both lossless compression is a must and where 4:2:0 would be absolutely catastrophic for quality.

Having your own font is nice and all, but I wish Nebula would spend at least as much time on their subtitle rendering as they've spent on this marketing site... The subtitle rendering on Nebula is worse than what Youtube offers, and Youtube isn't exactly some pinnacle of subtitle rendering either. I'd really expect better from a premium service.

I would also be interested in this. Subtitle presentation is something where browsers are still generally very bad at out of the box, so having good subtitle rendering support built directly into the library would make a lot of sense to me. As someone with a lot of knowledge on this subject, I would be very much willing to help at least draft design documents for something like this, if not more.

Been using (and occasionally contributing to) Sharp for quite a while, both professionally and personally. Great library to have at hand when you need to deal with images.

I made some revisions to the start of the article in order to make things more clear to the layman unfamiliar with anime and subtitling. Hopefully that clears things up!

The key to good endnotes is to make them a nice bonus for those interested rather than required reading for everyone. Basically, make the main text work on its own, then get into the weeds of translation details separately. It's the best of both worlds, though admittedly requires quite a bit of extra work to pull off.

Well... the very first paragraph of the article does say with highlighting how "the presentation quality for translations of on-screen text has taken a total nosedive". And then it shows visual examples of the new bad quality and gives comparison screenshots demonstrating good quality shortly after.

Good catch, thanks - I literally built the site alongside the article, so there's still some rough edges here and there.

Unfortunately, as the link describes, Netflix only makes this available for a very limited set of languages, while everyone else is stuck with the extremely limited text-based standards.

Frankly, those text-based subtitle standards are quite maddening on their own. Netflix's text-based subtitle rendering seems to support a much wider set of TTML features than what it actually allows subtitle providers to use - so if these restrictions were to be slightly relaxed, providers could start offering better subtitles for anime immediately with no additional effort from Netflix.

To be more specific, basically all online streaming today is based around the concept of segmented video (where the video is already split into regular X-second chunks). If you only hardsubbed the typesetting while keeping the dialogue softsubbed (which could then be offered in a simpler subtitle format where necessary), you would only need to have multiple copies of the segments that actually feature typesetting. Then you would just construct multiple playlists that use the correct segment variants, and you could make this work basically everywhere.

You can also use the same kind of segment-based playlist approach on Blu-ray if you wanted to, though theoretically you should be able to use the Blu-ray Picture-in-Picture feature to store the typesetting in a separate partially transparent video stream entirely that is then overlaid on top of the clean video during playback.

> CR could have used the ASS subs on their website and given the less-dynamic sub files to their vendors.

This is exactly what CR was doing for the past couple years, though you can't just automatically convert a fancy ASS file with typesetting into the limited kind of TTML subtitles that general streaming services expect, which is why Crunchyroll has been paying its subtitling staff extra to make those conversions semi-manually.

Though Crunchyroll could definitely improve its standard ASS workflows in ways that would make that conversion process significantly more automated with minimal extra effort on the subtitling staff's part. It wouldn't even be that hard, I've done something like that myself when I had to mangle ASS into limited WebVTT for some streaming work I did at one point.

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.