Netflix implements "imgsub"[1] - it actually delivers a zipped archive of transparent images to the player. So technically they can pre-render positioned typesetted subtitles on server and render them as images overlay, as long as there's no animated text effects.
In general, streaming services have to ensure maximum compatibility when playing their contents on all kinds of devices - high end and low end. For which on low end device it could be very resource constraining to render typesetted subtitles. There are other platforms where all video playback have to be managed by the platform system frameworks with limited format support, and streaming services can't do much about it.
The priority of streaming service is extending their market reach, and I think Crunchyroll itself is facing the same challenge of market reaching.
I think the right solution is trying to get typesetted subtitles, and the end-to-end workflow - creation, packaging, delivery, rendering with adaptation (device capabilities, user preferences, localizations etc) all standardized. A more efficient workflow is needed, so a single source of subtitle is able to generate a set of renditions suitable for different player render capabilities. Chrunchyroll should actively participate in these standard bodies and push for adaption for more features and support in the streaming industry.
This is the result of a ton of research into Crunchyroll's recent subtitle changes that have tanked the service's first-party presentation quality to an all-time low. The article ended up being quite long, so I highly appreciate anyone taking the time to read it in full!
Does Netflix really only allow 2 lines of subtitling on screen at a time? That's really stupid.
Also I remember when CR killed the Kodi plugin, that irked me enough to stick to DVD imports + fan subs for a while.
Finally, Ruri Rocks is such a good show, it got me to resubscribe to CR after not having subbed for years. If they screw with its subs I'm gonna root for this mess to bankrupt CR for good.
I didn't find an answer skimming: are they actively deleting old good subtitles and replacing with low-quality ones (as the title seems to suggest), have they simply changed their process for new subtitles, not spending as much to make nice ones? If they're actively deleting old good ones, that seems malicious.
I did find instances of them actively deleting old subtitles and replacing them with lower quality ones in the back catalog, yes. Which seems indicative of Crunchyroll wanting to eventually get rid of good subtitles altogether.
Keeping the "hard subs" content is a lot of videos as the subtitles were encoded into the video stream.
This makes CDNs and other systems more difficult to utilize because we have a ton of video streams with just caption changes as opposed to just the Japanese audio source + caption files.
It's one of those things that doesn't seem that problematic till you include all the video_qualities to support streaming bandwith. So you also get a #hardSubLanguages * #videoQualities
Obviously you probably thought about it but what about rendering the subtitles on top of the video stream? Was there a reason it was not possible (e.g DRMs?)
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.
If you hardsub the video, then you need to have a full copy of the video for every language. That's the opposite of what people want. They want a single textless video source that can then accommodate any internationalization.
The article claims that you can slice up the video and only use language-specific hardsubs for parts that need it. I'd be interested if there are technical reasons that can't be done.
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.
Crunchyroll is currently using a subtitle rendering stack that is highly unique in the media industry, being based on the Advanced SubStation Alpha (ASS) subtitle format. It seems that the current executives would like to replace this unique stack with something more "industry standard" (and far less capable), but they can't do that as long as their back catalog is full of ASS subtitles - if they just switched stacks without doing anything else, all of these back catalog subtitles would just stop working completely. Which is why in order to perform such a stack switch, all old subtitles would need to be replaced with worse ones to make them compatible with the less capable new stack.
Per the article, on top of this, the Crunchyroll subtitle authoring tools and the Crunchyroll player both use ASS. So the directive to have the “master” copy be the more widespread and limited TTML… means that many new shows are doing ASS-to-TTML-to-ASS conversions! Quite literally the lowest common denominator of shared functionality.
IIUC, it comes down to simplifying playback/subtitle rendering to the lowest common denominator among the various western streaming platforms.
The good/old subtitles in the ASS format required a more complex playback system than what Netflix/Hulu (and maybe blueray players) currently offer. This could be worked around by burning the subs into the video stream, but then you need to keep separate copies of your (large) video files for each subtitled language.
That doesn't seem like it'd be such a huge problem to me, but what do I know?
The post does a good job explaining the effective monopoly system at play that prevents real competition to provide any pressure to improve or maintain the prior quality.
It's an X*N*N problem: n_videos, bitrates, formats.
Assuming each video in its largest bitrate is... 2gb for example, and assuming S3 is $0.025/gb, that's a nickle per month or let's say $0.50/yr for that video.
Next up is reduced bitrates, assume you go from 2gb to 1gb and finally 500mb. Round up and you're at $1/video.
Now duplicate it to AV1 and MP4, and multiply that by English, French, and Spanish (oh, and let's say Japanese and Chinese too for good measure).
So a single 2gb video goes from $1/yr to $10/yr, and you're not doing "the dumb simple thing" for subtitles which would basically 4x your cost over "commodity subtitling services".
Or "simplify, simplify simplify", you reduce costs (cha-ching!), and become compatible for syndication or redistribution (cha-ching!)
... and they would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for those meddling kids!
Except ASS streams really aren't that big and don't have to be stored with each encode. They can just be in a separate file. And this is how cr used to serve them. Before they used hardware drm you could just download all of the separate sub tracks.
Lots of old CR content was fan subs which may or may not have followed any kind of "best practices". It was also a reason that CR struggled with legitimacy with the studios in the early days. They tried to remove content once a US company licensed a show as way to show they weren't pirates, but the friction was always there.
Without knowing for sure, a conceivable strategy would be making it so that users who don't know that "good subs" can exist more readily accept "bad subs" as the standard. Same playbook as Google lobotomizing search and the index that search can access because that traditional search product is more efficacious than Gemini, which Google is trying to push on users.
Never used Crunchyroll, but this is a pretty interesting read! Did not finish it yet though.
I see you doing a ton of styling, which makes it a very pleasant reading experience, may I ask what techniques do you use? Is cyan just to replace bold or something else?
The cyan is basically just bold, but also a highlighter. I was using just plain bold initially but started experimenting with it and landed on this. Pairs quite nicely with the pink links, IMO.
CrunchyRoll did something like that to the Re:Zero dub's captions, and it's a disgrace. Every single proper noun is wrong. It messes up every fantasy item/place/monster/etc name, and can't distinguish between the Rem/Ram/Rom characters. It also has no concept of of which character is talking, and interprets dialogues as singular sentences.
This is unfortunately the answer - VLC/MPV would allow you to select the dubbed audio and also select the EN-US subtitles that are based on the original audio.
GabeN saying that piracy is first and foremost a service problem is still right on the money.
Yeah, ASS rendering was a big problem for me when I was making some online subtitling software. I ended up on using https://github.com/ThaUnknown/jassub + using Mediabunny to render a "subtitles" media track on top rendered on a canvas.
A similar issue has been plaguing the manga industry since "The Great Scanlator Purge" that took place a few years ago, leaving only the "official" Viz media-contracted translators in the wake of the ruins. For some reason, this change came with a general unwillingness on the translators part to correct, or translate, concepts that virtually all fan translators would've been happy to do.
Some examples:
1) the explanation of puns and hidden meanings in the kanji used to describe names, locations, special abilities, jokes, etc. of which there are usually many. Understanding/being aware of this context used to be absolutely vital to the experience of reading manga.
2) there's a relatively new manga called "Versus", in which humans from parallel earths, in parallel universes all merge into the same universe, and their planets are also merged together. In the english version, Viz translates one of those worlds as "Indignia", which doesn't mean anything. However, the Japanese for this world is "怒ど神しん界かい" (Doshinkai), which is literally interpreted as "World of the Angry God", or "Mad God World". They took it upon themselves to make similar changes for all the other worlds, obscuring their original meanings as intended by the author... why? Beats me. Now, one could make the argument that "Mad God World" doesn't sound good in english, so the Viz translators change is an improvement, which is not unreasonable. However, any half-decent fan translator would've simply left a footnote like "the literal Japanese interpretation is X; I changed it to Indignia because...". Problem solved! Don't just retcon things because you feel like it without explaining yourself. And if you won't explain yourself, then leave it as is.
3) english One Piece readers have no idea just how many things are lost in translation; One Piece is filled to the brim with puns, double-entendre's, and foreshadowing, which has always been a significant part of its appeal, and is now nowhere to be found via the official providers.
4) cover pages! You wouldn't know it anymore, but manga often has cover pages (often officially colorized) with extra comments and tidbits from the authors. Fans would include these pages in their scanlations. Viz pretends they don't exist.
I can only imagine the thought process of whoever's making these decisions at Viz (or its parent company Shueisha) resembles something like "westerners don't care about that stuff. Stop wasting precious time and resources trying to explain it". They don't quite seem to understand how badly they have diluted the manga reading experience in the west, especially for those of us that grew up reading this stuff, way before it reached mainstream popularity.
This article badly needs an editor. Even though it's a topic I'm very interested in (and with the perspective of being semi-fluent in Japanese), it's so rambling and visually messy that I gave up halfway through.
There was also a discussion somewhere where they switched off the OSS subtitling software they were using onto a commercial product that doesn't implement many of the features (mostly typesetting features) of the previous software.
> With such typesetting-hostile standards to deal with, Crunchyroll had basically two choices for how to make sublicensing to Amazon and Netflix work with their existing subtitles that feature actual typesetting: Either 1) try to negotiate with the services for permission to make use of more TTML capabilities (that the subtitle renderers of said services should already support!) or 2) start mangling subtitles with typesetting into something compatible with the awful subtitling standards of the general streaming services.
Couldn't they also provide Amazon and Netflix a version of the video stream with baked in subtitles?
> Netflix requires a non-subtitled version of the content. Netflix defines “non-subtitled” as the presence of main titles, end credits, location call-outs, and other supportive/creative text, but no burned-in subtitled dialogue, regardless of the language in the primary video.
> Global packaging requires component asset packages to be delivered with a semi-textless video file that can be localized with discrete subtitles and audio dubbing.
> Also known as “Texted with no subtitles,” “Textless with main, ends, and graphic text,” and “Non-subtitled”, Prime Video defines semi-textless as a video master without burned-in subtitles, regardless of the language.
Those vendors likely won’t accept hardsubs, because it would mean 10 video files for 10 languages, instead of soft subs where you get 1 video file 10 languages (10 different subtitle files).
But here’s the other thing - CR could have used the ASS subs on their website and given the less-dynamic sub files to their vendors. You can save a master subtitle file in whatever format you want.
> 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 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.
Surely automatically converting into a lesser subtitle format is a much better use of AI than machine transcription. I disagree with the idea that "you can't just automatically convert" at today's technology level.
Tried watching some CR content on Amazon Prime. Unusable. The subs are garbage. Better quality from Netflix which is a freaking random host not even anime focused. Had to cancel the CR sub. Literally unwatchable
The mass market has already responded that they want dubbed anime. It doesn't make sense to invest into subtitles. Maybe it's time to accept that you are not the target audience anymore of western anime distributors.
Quality typesetting is just as important for dubs as it is for subs, actually! All that on-screen text will be there regardless of which audio track you are using.
It baffles me how this is a thing. Not just regarding anime but any non-English language show or film. I've never come across a dub that wasn't at least five times worse in every way.
That number varies depending on who you ask, with CR being one of the sources that claims a heavier share of dub watchers, but half their business is now dubbing/localization (by way of Funimation merger) so it may not be the most objective source.
Either way it’s bad business to throw some of your most loyal customers under the bus, regardless of how big of a portion they represent. Dub viewers tend to be more casual and fickle and will largely evaporate once the zeitgeist of popular media moves from anime onto something else.
I am saying that they can get away with lower quality subtitles in such places because the average user does not care that much about it. The target audience is not the same as when they first started doing subtitles and it doesn't make business sense anymore. Anime is not special. If the rest of the video streaming industry can get away with simpler subtitles, then Crunchyroll can too.
People that are into anime are into anime because it is special. JoJo's Bizzare Adventure is cool when Marvel movies aren't because JoJo was made by one mangaka and a Marvel movie is made by a committee of committees.
Netflix implements "imgsub"[1] - it actually delivers a zipped archive of transparent images to the player. So technically they can pre-render positioned typesetted subtitles on server and render them as images overlay, as long as there's no animated text effects.
In general, streaming services have to ensure maximum compatibility when playing their contents on all kinds of devices - high end and low end. For which on low end device it could be very resource constraining to render typesetted subtitles. There are other platforms where all video playback have to be managed by the platform system frameworks with limited format support, and streaming services can't do much about it.
The priority of streaming service is extending their market reach, and I think Crunchyroll itself is facing the same challenge of market reaching.
I think the right solution is trying to get typesetted subtitles, and the end-to-end workflow - creation, packaging, delivery, rendering with adaptation (device capabilities, user preferences, localizations etc) all standardized. A more efficient workflow is needed, so a single source of subtitle is able to generate a set of renditions suitable for different player render capabilities. Chrunchyroll should actively participate in these standard bodies and push for adaption for more features and support in the streaming industry.
[1]: https://netflixsubs.app/docs/netflix/features/imgsub
This is the result of a ton of research into Crunchyroll's recent subtitle changes that have tanked the service's first-party presentation quality to an all-time low. The article ended up being quite long, so I highly appreciate anyone taking the time to read it in full!
Does Netflix really only allow 2 lines of subtitling on screen at a time? That's really stupid.
Also I remember when CR killed the Kodi plugin, that irked me enough to stick to DVD imports + fan subs for a while.
Finally, Ruri Rocks is such a good show, it got me to resubscribe to CR after not having subbed for years. If they screw with its subs I'm gonna root for this mess to bankrupt CR for good.
See for yourself: https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/215...
> 4. Line Treatment
> 2 lines maximum
I didn't find an answer skimming: are they actively deleting old good subtitles and replacing with low-quality ones (as the title seems to suggest), have they simply changed their process for new subtitles, not spending as much to make nice ones? If they're actively deleting old good ones, that seems malicious.
I did find instances of them actively deleting old subtitles and replacing them with lower quality ones in the back catalog, yes. Which seems indicative of Crunchyroll wanting to eventually get rid of good subtitles altogether.
What possible incentive could they have for doing this?
I worked at crunchyroll.
Keeping the "hard subs" content is a lot of videos as the subtitles were encoded into the video stream.
This makes CDNs and other systems more difficult to utilize because we have a ton of video streams with just caption changes as opposed to just the Japanese audio source + caption files.
It's one of those things that doesn't seem that problematic till you include all the video_qualities to support streaming bandwith. So you also get a #hardSubLanguages * #videoQualities
Obviously you probably thought about it but what about rendering the subtitles on top of the video stream? Was there a reason it was not possible (e.g DRMs?)
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.
If you hardsub the video, then you need to have a full copy of the video for every language. That's the opposite of what people want. They want a single textless video source that can then accommodate any internationalization.
The article claims that you can slice up the video and only use language-specific hardsubs for parts that need it. I'd be interested if there are technical reasons that can't be done.
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.
What reason would there be for removing old, loved subtitles? Licensing fees?
Crunchyroll is currently using a subtitle rendering stack that is highly unique in the media industry, being based on the Advanced SubStation Alpha (ASS) subtitle format. It seems that the current executives would like to replace this unique stack with something more "industry standard" (and far less capable), but they can't do that as long as their back catalog is full of ASS subtitles - if they just switched stacks without doing anything else, all of these back catalog subtitles would just stop working completely. Which is why in order to perform such a stack switch, all old subtitles would need to be replaced with worse ones to make them compatible with the less capable new stack.
Per the article, on top of this, the Crunchyroll subtitle authoring tools and the Crunchyroll player both use ASS. So the directive to have the “master” copy be the more widespread and limited TTML… means that many new shows are doing ASS-to-TTML-to-ASS conversions! Quite literally the lowest common denominator of shared functionality.
IIUC, it comes down to simplifying playback/subtitle rendering to the lowest common denominator among the various western streaming platforms.
The good/old subtitles in the ASS format required a more complex playback system than what Netflix/Hulu (and maybe blueray players) currently offer. This could be worked around by burning the subs into the video stream, but then you need to keep separate copies of your (large) video files for each subtitled language.
That doesn't seem like it'd be such a huge problem to me, but what do I know?
The post does a good job explaining the effective monopoly system at play that prevents real competition to provide any pressure to improve or maintain the prior quality.
It's an X*N*N problem: n_videos, bitrates, formats.
Assuming each video in its largest bitrate is... 2gb for example, and assuming S3 is $0.025/gb, that's a nickle per month or let's say $0.50/yr for that video.
Next up is reduced bitrates, assume you go from 2gb to 1gb and finally 500mb. Round up and you're at $1/video.
Now duplicate it to AV1 and MP4, and multiply that by English, French, and Spanish (oh, and let's say Japanese and Chinese too for good measure).
So a single 2gb video goes from $1/yr to $10/yr, and you're not doing "the dumb simple thing" for subtitles which would basically 4x your cost over "commodity subtitling services".
Or "simplify, simplify simplify", you reduce costs (cha-ching!), and become compatible for syndication or redistribution (cha-ching!)
... and they would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for those meddling kids!
Except ASS streams really aren't that big and don't have to be stored with each encode. They can just be in a separate file. And this is how cr used to serve them. Before they used hardware drm you could just download all of the separate sub tracks.
You don't need to multiply anything here.
Lots of old CR content was fan subs which may or may not have followed any kind of "best practices". It was also a reason that CR struggled with legitimacy with the studios in the early days. They tried to remove content once a US company licensed a show as way to show they weren't pirates, but the friction was always there.
Without knowing for sure, a conceivable strategy would be making it so that users who don't know that "good subs" can exist more readily accept "bad subs" as the standard. Same playbook as Google lobotomizing search and the index that search can access because that traditional search product is more efficacious than Gemini, which Google is trying to push on users.
Never used Crunchyroll, but this is a pretty interesting read! Did not finish it yet though.
I see you doing a ton of styling, which makes it a very pleasant reading experience, may I ask what techniques do you use? Is cyan just to replace bold or something else?
The cyan is basically just bold, but also a highlighter. I was using just plain bold initially but started experimenting with it and landed on this. Pairs quite nicely with the pink links, IMO.
It's so hard finding dubbed anime WITH subtitles. Like actually ridiculously hard.
My wife is deaf and I like dubbed so I can use my laptop while we chill but she literally needs subtitles so it's super annoying when a show either
1. Has no subtitles for dubbed.
2. Their subtitles are just the subbed version's subtitles which are drastically different from what the dubbed VAs are actually saying.
3. Has subtitles for some episodes but none for others seemingly randomly.
Lack of closed captions and dubtitles are definitely very real issues as well, though this article is solely focused on subtitles.
If you ever need to hack some subs by yourself, whisper.cpp can output .srt files and you can run the small or medium models even on modest hardware.
CrunchyRoll did something like that to the Re:Zero dub's captions, and it's a disgrace. Every single proper noun is wrong. It messes up every fantasy item/place/monster/etc name, and can't distinguish between the Rem/Ram/Rom characters. It also has no concept of of which character is talking, and interprets dialogues as singular sentences.
at this point you're probably better off going to a torrent site and search for 'dual-audio'
This is unfortunately the answer - VLC/MPV would allow you to select the dubbed audio and also select the EN-US subtitles that are based on the original audio.
GabeN saying that piracy is first and foremost a service problem is still right on the money.
Most streaming companies are forgetting what they were competing with when they started out.
Arr, well, ‘tis high time they be rememberin’!
Yeah, ASS rendering was a big problem for me when I was making some online subtitling software. I ended up on using https://github.com/ThaUnknown/jassub + using Mediabunny to render a "subtitles" media track on top rendered on a canvas.
The result works pretty well, e.g. https://www.translate.mom/app/task/2UicdIqRBg0f
A similar issue has been plaguing the manga industry since "The Great Scanlator Purge" that took place a few years ago, leaving only the "official" Viz media-contracted translators in the wake of the ruins. For some reason, this change came with a general unwillingness on the translators part to correct, or translate, concepts that virtually all fan translators would've been happy to do.
Some examples:
1) the explanation of puns and hidden meanings in the kanji used to describe names, locations, special abilities, jokes, etc. of which there are usually many. Understanding/being aware of this context used to be absolutely vital to the experience of reading manga.
2) there's a relatively new manga called "Versus", in which humans from parallel earths, in parallel universes all merge into the same universe, and their planets are also merged together. In the english version, Viz translates one of those worlds as "Indignia", which doesn't mean anything. However, the Japanese for this world is "怒ど神しん界かい" (Doshinkai), which is literally interpreted as "World of the Angry God", or "Mad God World". They took it upon themselves to make similar changes for all the other worlds, obscuring their original meanings as intended by the author... why? Beats me. Now, one could make the argument that "Mad God World" doesn't sound good in english, so the Viz translators change is an improvement, which is not unreasonable. However, any half-decent fan translator would've simply left a footnote like "the literal Japanese interpretation is X; I changed it to Indignia because...". Problem solved! Don't just retcon things because you feel like it without explaining yourself. And if you won't explain yourself, then leave it as is.
3) english One Piece readers have no idea just how many things are lost in translation; One Piece is filled to the brim with puns, double-entendre's, and foreshadowing, which has always been a significant part of its appeal, and is now nowhere to be found via the official providers.
4) cover pages! You wouldn't know it anymore, but manga often has cover pages (often officially colorized) with extra comments and tidbits from the authors. Fans would include these pages in their scanlations. Viz pretends they don't exist.
I can only imagine the thought process of whoever's making these decisions at Viz (or its parent company Shueisha) resembles something like "westerners don't care about that stuff. Stop wasting precious time and resources trying to explain it". They don't quite seem to understand how badly they have diluted the manga reading experience in the west, especially for those of us that grew up reading this stuff, way before it reached mainstream popularity.
Sort of unrelated, but has anyone else noticed that there are a lot of subtitling errors in netflix shows recently? Two I noticed yesterday:
"natural world" -> "national world"
"cede power" -> "seed power"
I guess they're just machine transcribing it without oversight now?
This article badly needs an editor. Even though it's a topic I'm very interested in (and with the perspective of being semi-fluent in Japanese), it's so rambling and visually messy that I gave up halfway through.
Relevant discussion from a previous post. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45497900
There was also a discussion somewhere where they switched off the OSS subtitling software they were using onto a commercial product that doesn't implement many of the features (mostly typesetting features) of the previous software.
The linked article here goes over all of that in great detail!
> With such typesetting-hostile standards to deal with, Crunchyroll had basically two choices for how to make sublicensing to Amazon and Netflix work with their existing subtitles that feature actual typesetting: Either 1) try to negotiate with the services for permission to make use of more TTML capabilities (that the subtitle renderers of said services should already support!) or 2) start mangling subtitles with typesetting into something compatible with the awful subtitling standards of the general streaming services.
Couldn't they also provide Amazon and Netflix a version of the video stream with baked in subtitles?
Both services explicitly disallow this by default in their delivery specifications, unfortunately.
Netflix: https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/215...
> Netflix requires a non-subtitled version of the content. Netflix defines “non-subtitled” as the presence of main titles, end credits, location call-outs, and other supportive/creative text, but no burned-in subtitled dialogue, regardless of the language in the primary video.
Amazon: https://videocentral.amazon.com/support/delivery-experience/...
> Video
> Global packaging requires component asset packages to be delivered with a semi-textless video file that can be localized with discrete subtitles and audio dubbing.
> Also known as “Texted with no subtitles,” “Textless with main, ends, and graphic text,” and “Non-subtitled”, Prime Video defines semi-textless as a video master without burned-in subtitles, regardless of the language.
Those vendors likely won’t accept hardsubs, because it would mean 10 video files for 10 languages, instead of soft subs where you get 1 video file 10 languages (10 different subtitle files).
But here’s the other thing - CR could have used the ASS subs on their website and given the less-dynamic sub files to their vendors. You can save a master subtitle file in whatever format you want.
> 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 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.
Surely automatically converting into a lesser subtitle format is a much better use of AI than machine transcription. I disagree with the idea that "you can't just automatically convert" at today's technology level.
There is a solution: learn Japanese!
Tried watching some CR content on Amazon Prime. Unusable. The subs are garbage. Better quality from Netflix which is a freaking random host not even anime focused. Had to cancel the CR sub. Literally unwatchable
Considering how Crunchyroll started out by streaming ripped off anime content, hope they fail
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The mass market has already responded that they want dubbed anime. It doesn't make sense to invest into subtitles. Maybe it's time to accept that you are not the target audience anymore of western anime distributors.
Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle just set records for western anime distribution, and 55% watched it subtitled.
https://deadline.com/2025/09/box-office-demon-slayer-infinit...
The market has spoken, indeed.
Quality typesetting is just as important for dubs as it is for subs, actually! All that on-screen text will be there regardless of which audio track you are using.
It baffles me how this is a thing. Not just regarding anime but any non-English language show or film. I've never come across a dub that wasn't at least five times worse in every way.
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That number varies depending on who you ask, with CR being one of the sources that claims a heavier share of dub watchers, but half their business is now dubbing/localization (by way of Funimation merger) so it may not be the most objective source.
Either way it’s bad business to throw some of your most loyal customers under the bus, regardless of how big of a portion they represent. Dub viewers tend to be more casual and fickle and will largely evaporate once the zeitgeist of popular media moves from anime onto something else.
you still need to subtitle the japanese text in signs, chat messages and other places that appear on the screen.
I am saying that they can get away with lower quality subtitles in such places because the average user does not care that much about it. The target audience is not the same as when they first started doing subtitles and it doesn't make business sense anymore. Anime is not special. If the rest of the video streaming industry can get away with simpler subtitles, then Crunchyroll can too.
People that are into anime are into anime because it is special. JoJo's Bizzare Adventure is cool when Marvel movies aren't because JoJo was made by one mangaka and a Marvel movie is made by a committee of committees.
Let me guess: AI?