Yeah, I've given up on new movies. If I want naturalistic without a storyline, I can just go outside. I'm not going to turn the volume up to the level required to hear the mumbled whispers, just to have my hearing damaged by the next gunshot or blast of music.
Subtitles aren't a fix -- they're distracting and therefore annoying. A selectable "classic" audio track would be the fix.
Do any HNers find those cues sufficiently distracting that they’re excited about this feature? I always have subtitles on. While I find those cues occasionally amusing, I’ve never found them to be an impediment to my enjoyment. Maybe they are for people who read slowly? Or because they break the fourth wall?
Quiet parts loud, loud parts quiet.
It's the kind of thing where there is a horse-drawn carriage going by on screen and they print the text "[clip clop clip clop]". If you can't hear it, wouldn't you just want to watch it?
[Window breaking]
[Gun cocking]
[Stairs creaking]
The weird ones for me are where some absolutely unintelligible background murmuring is subtitled. I couldn't tell that any actual words had been spoken and suddenly it's all spelt out.
Not sure why this is being presented a something new here.
Pro Max buyers get "cut" too.
They real advantage is that you don't need to create priper subtitles that are subject to different standards. So, they are cheaper.
They have different standards for stuff like how many letters to show on screen at the same time and for how long.
I've seen this option for a long time, I always assumed they create them as the starting point of subtitling in foreign languages. Presumably nobody is French, hard of hearing and wants to watch an English language program.
Progress is always slow but inevitable.
This won't replace the mixer I run my audio through, though. A bit of a pain, and you need a mixer, but try it if you can.
I don't get why this is complicated.
Video games have also had this as an explicit option for many years, maybe decades (Half Life 2 comes to mind).
Not only did Netflix not invent this, I could swear some of their shows have had it for years already...
English (CC) is described as separate from English; and then, a sentence or two later, they use the phrase “CC/SDH”.
So, Netflix is changing their definition of the word “subtitles” to represent dialogue-only captions, as a distinct thing from CC/SDH “captions” — even though the S in CC/SDH stands for subtitles.
It might be interesting to look to the .SRT file communities and see whether user-produced contributions contain sfx/bgm subtitles or merely dialogue subtitles, as that could reveal a similar shift in definition/usage prior to Netflix’s press release about their own.
Cheers to Netflix in the age of user hostile and anti ergonomic patterns (while they still have their fair share of sins in this area, at least one good news)
While my high-end home theater audio system has DSP functions like dynamic compression which I can apply to smooth out the center channel, that's relying on a blanket algorithm in an attempt to fix something that's much better fixed on the mixing stage in the first place. The mixing engineers have much better tools which they can selectively apply when needed and even have the option of problematic dialog being re-looped if necessary. It's their job to get this right and they certainly have the all the tools and training to do it properly and only when, and as much, as actually necessary. Having home viewers slap some auto-mode plug-in over the entire run time of a sound mix that was painstakingly hand-mastered scene-by-scene is objectively the worst way to solve the problem.
This simply makes no sense because the entire modern signal chain is digital. There's no technical reason the gain shouldn't be correct. The fact that dialog audio levels are still a recurring problem in my properly calibrated, 11.2.4 THX-rated dedicated home theater must be that the audio engineers aren't being given the time and resources to do their job properly or are being instructed to do this as some misguided aesthetic choice (looking at you Christopher Nolan).
Raising the center channel never sounded great to me, because there are so many other sounds in the center channel as well.
At least now I can raise only the dialogue levels on demand.
Both my streaming device and AVR each have their own flavor of dialog enhancer and they do help improve the problem substantially. But I don't feel 'good' about just leaving this kind of post-processing feature on long-term and certainly not as a widely recommended best practice (except for hearing impaired users). I guess the reason for my reluctance is more in principle than practical. It's just not the right technical approach to solving the root problem, and any automatic algorithm, no matter how adaptive, dynamic or clever, will sometimes fail to do the right thing. It also bothers me that every implementation of dialog enhancer I've seen is opaque and undocumented.
I've been in and around video and audio engineering for most of my career, especially on the broadcast tooling side creating new gear. I go way back to the analog days when we could only dream of having such a pristine digital signal throughout the entire signal chain. We were always battling generation loss and noise on the production side and on the home theater side, we spent time and money slathering various noise reduction and other 'enhancement' processing to fix the worst aspects of the degraded analog signals we received.
At long last, today we live in that sci-fi future nirvana where the same levels the director approved on the mixing stage can be exactly what you hear at home. So, yeah, I have some PTSD about still needing to slap some post-process on at home to fix issues that should not be there in the first place. We waited decades for this tech to arrive, so the engineer in me wants it to work - without fixes or user patches. And that means addressing the issue at the source.
So instead of <Phil: Blah blah> it would be <Raspy voice: Blah blah>.
I don’t have examples for this, but it happens regularly that I noticed it as a trend. Might be because subtitles are outsourced and maybe the importance of exposition is not clear to the people creating the subtitles?
ChrisArchitect•9mo ago