(Technology Connections) Closed captions on DVDs are getting left behind [33:46]
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I spent my college days ripping and manually correcting OCR'd subtitles for more movies than I care to count in the early 2000s. Do you mean to say I could have monetized it?
Also, fuck lower case Ls and upper case is
Highly doubt you can monetize it. Most groups do it as a hobby because they care about preservation. Internal groups don’t lack the time or storage space. What we do lack is dedicated BluRay rippers from distant regions.
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One format selling better than another dead format is hardly a useful data point.
It’s not really dead, but they’ve definitely scaled down their operations. With streaming services increasing their prices YoY I believe the return to physical media will be cheaper in some cases.
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It’s not really dead, but they’ve definitely scaled down their operations. With streaming services increasing their prices YoY I believe the return to physical media will be cheaper in some cases.
File based formats are just so much better than the shit formats with a specific type of media baked in like Audio CDs and Video DVDs and BR. Especially when those are combined with deliberate deviations from the standard for "copy protection" or with DRM.
Not to mention that you don't have to give up the advantages of networks along with the disadvantages of streaming services. Files can be downloaded, uploaded and copied across the network just fine.
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As a ripper myself for one of the internal groups, both DVDs and Blu rays have this annoying thing where they include the subtitles in image format (PGS for BRs, forgot what the DVD one was). It’s a headache for the rippers and encoders because we then need to OCR the subtitles for the encodes we put out there. Sometimes if we get lucky the movie is on a streaming platform making this process obsolete as we grab the .vtt files from the streaming service and sync it with the BR we’re making (as well as transforming it to .srt) . My only assumption as to why MPAA decided on image format subs for both DVDs and BRs is because it makes it easy to deal with different languages and the likes, you just display a static image and fk everything else. But for the people putting out quality releases if we ship PGS that means we’re just doing a bad job.
Support your fav trackers (and their internals!)
Thank you for your service.
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These videos are really interesting but sometimes I really wish they were more concise. I know its his whole thing but damn I want the knowledge.
I kind of love that about his videos. I scoff at the time, but then start the video and next thing I know it’s a half hour later and I’ve learned something in a surprising amount of depth.
I like a world where not everything needs to be 5 minute videos. Some things can be longer form.
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File based formats are just so much better than the shit formats with a specific type of media baked in like Audio CDs and Video DVDs and BR. Especially when those are combined with deliberate deviations from the standard for "copy protection" or with DRM.
Not to mention that you don't have to give up the advantages of networks along with the disadvantages of streaming services. Files can be downloaded, uploaded and copied across the network just fine.
You’re preaching to the choir. That’s why we spend time making remuxes and encodes. But for release groups to make those we need the format to survive, because Hollywood won’t make the physical media if there’s no copy protection.
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You’re preaching to the choir. That’s why we spend time making remuxes and encodes. But for release groups to make those we need the format to survive, because Hollywood won’t make the physical media if there’s no copy protection.
Hollywood seems to have invented the ultimate in copy protection in recent years anyway, making movies so bad nobody even wants to watch them. It is not used by 100% of movies yet but it is spreading.
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What is the "it" that you think got left behind?
I meant that in the video it's consistently not worked for a very long time. Seems the switch to HDMI left it behind. While it would be nice if devices supported it like he asked, the fact it was skipped in the HDMI standard and not mandated by law means it's unlikely devices racing too the bottom line will ever care. And that's basically what we see. Only the most expensive devices even acknowledge it's an issue.
That said, I hope VLC devs see his video and improve things. I'm sure it's more complicated then it seems but it would be cool for them to add that to the ways they're better than every other player put there.
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As a ripper myself for one of the internal groups, both DVDs and Blu rays have this annoying thing where they include the subtitles in image format (PGS for BRs, forgot what the DVD one was). It’s a headache for the rippers and encoders because we then need to OCR the subtitles for the encodes we put out there. Sometimes if we get lucky the movie is on a streaming platform making this process obsolete as we grab the .vtt files from the streaming service and sync it with the BR we’re making (as well as transforming it to .srt) . My only assumption as to why MPAA decided on image format subs for both DVDs and BRs is because it makes it easy to deal with different languages and the likes, you just display a static image and fk everything else. But for the people putting out quality releases if we ship PGS that means we’re just doing a bad job.
Support your fav trackers (and their internals!)
dvd should be VOBSUB
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And the downloaded ones are never in sync properly.
That's on you for loading the wrong kind.
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Alec is also (unsurprisingly) on the Fedi: https://mas.to/@TechConnectify
shouldnt it be @TechConnectify@mas.to ?
Weird. Doesnt work somehow...
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Because of the way those captions are stored VLC has to use OCR to convert the .SRT file (which basically stores low resolution b/w images I assume to easier allow for different alphabets) to normal text. I don't know why the open source solutions are so bad at this (especially considering how good the proprietary solutions seem to be) but I had similar problems ripping a DVD. I would assume that had he turned off the special font VLC uses for the subtitles and instead just seen the raw data there wouldn't have been a problem. Why VLC doesn't enable this by default (/ have this) I don't know.
This is not about DVD subtitles, which are images as you say. This is about "Line 21" closed captioning. I.E. the text data that is embedded in an analog tv signal. There should be no OCR needed.
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Because of the way those captions are stored VLC has to use OCR to convert the .SRT file (which basically stores low resolution b/w images I assume to easier allow for different alphabets) to normal text. I don't know why the open source solutions are so bad at this (especially considering how good the proprietary solutions seem to be) but I had similar problems ripping a DVD. I would assume that had he turned off the special font VLC uses for the subtitles and instead just seen the raw data there wouldn't have been a problem. Why VLC doesn't enable this by default (/ have this) I don't know.
There is no .srt in this case. This is also not about bitmap dvd vobsubs.
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Man I remember when dvds were a new thing. The sixth sense was the first dvd I ever bought. dvds used to have interactive menus, Easter eggs, multiple behind the scenes documentaries and videos, photos and info on the production.
Now you buy a blu ray and it goes straight to the movie, no menu, no features, no bts footage, just the movie and nothing else. -
ownership of media is getting left behind.
Legal ownership, that is
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All my DVD's stopped working when I moved to another country anyway.
There are non-region locked DVD players.
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I kind of love that about his videos. I scoff at the time, but then start the video and next thing I know it’s a half hour later and I’ve learned something in a surprising amount of depth.
I like a world where not everything needs to be 5 minute videos. Some things can be longer form.
Very fair, this comment is likely a result of me not being able to do that this week. But I have ploughed through hours of dishwashers, EV brakes and rice cookers in a day before.
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There are non-region locked DVD players.
I did have one for a while but it broke and DVD isn't really high enough quality to watch any more anyway. Though I do feel like my PlayStation should play them which it doesn't.
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There are non-region locked DVD players.
Blu Ray players too. I have a Sony BPX 370, and it will play any (non 3D or 4k) Blu Ray or DVD from anywhere in the world.
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I'm surprised VLC fares that badly with CCs encoded this way. Usually it's pretty good. I'm also now wondering if ffmpeg also shares the same problem
The top Youtube comment by Ridley Combs explains it pretty well:
FFmpeg maintainer here, and the details behind the caption decoding issues you're seeing in VLC are complex and horrific. They largely stem from how the EIA-608 caption format expects text to be laid out in a monospace grid onscreen, which isn't really how the text rendering stacks used for modern subtitling work (this is probably why changing the font caused problems on those Sony players); beyond that, the behavior can just end up pretty complex, and there's no convenient public-domain corpus of sample files for open-source software developers to test against. These kinds of issues also affect the Japanese (ARIB) and European (Teletext) formats to varying extents. These days, a lot of the focus ends up being on converting the text into modern Unicode text formats, styled using modern techniques, so direct rendering of the legacy formats hasn't had as much attention lately.
