For this one show (John Oliver) I download, I always get ALL CAPS and poorly synced subtitles. The text seems OK, but it’s barely usable because very off-sync. I’m curious: where do these subs come from?
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if it’s a tv show it could be that they come from the tv signal, those usually are all caps and poorly synced because it’s tech from the 80s
Oh that “teletext” thing I guess, I get it. I remember using subtitles from this source in France in the 90s, and it was never that off sync. I guess the way they’re ripped may make the offsyncedness worse.
I only saw American closed captions on live TV almost two decades ago but the quality was much worse than the European teletext. In my country the teletext subtitles had small caps, italics and colors to identify who’s talking instead the American ones, I’m guessing because they were introduced a few years earlier with a more primitive tech, were always behind and not exactly accurate to what was spoken, like if someone was typing them on the fly
well actually!
Teletext is a british invention, and the basis for european television caption.
the US system is based on the european one, and it’s likely that the reason for the difference on the captioning is something other than the tech. f.ex that in US it’s less common to use cc or smth, or that the cc was made live, i.e. during the broadcast, like a fotball match or smth.
closed captions from the live tv broadcast
This, right here. Live Closed Captions are often a fair bit behind the actual video, because when it comes to accessibility it’s more important to get the text right than to get the timing right.
Why not both?
The subtitles could be for an alternate release of the show that is either offset by a fixed amount or runs slightly faster or slower.
Nah, because it’s like no text for 30 secs, then “3 lines per second” (faster than you can read), then more or less synced, then again too slow/too fast. That teletext explanation someone else gave is more plausible. I cannot believe that the original are that bad, so my guess is that the way they’re ripped has issues.
I just saw in the airport someone watching “Gilmore girls” on Netflix and it had ALL CAPS English subtitles. They also seemed out of sync, the mom was speaking with no subs under her figure
So a source of those poor quality subs might be Netflix that just trusted broadcast subs
