Comment by throwaway0426
2 years ago
This is why I always turn on subtitles. The only draw is that the subtitles include sound effects and other information that can sometimes be distracting. I see the need for those, but I wish there was an alternative.
I think Netflix and others should provide two sets of subtitles. One for those who need closed captioning because they need the extra information, and a subtitle that only include the dialog.
Another pet peeve of mine is unnecessary audio effects. Once you start noticing it, they are as obvious and unimaginative as the Wilhelm scream. If you absolutely need to add some crickets to prove that the scene is filmed outdoors and not in a studio, go ahead. But don't add dog barks, cat fights and other distracting sounds to make "ambience". Everyone else does that too you know?
Pet owners often hate scenes where two people are talking outside, because there's a big chance someone adds a dog barking in the background and their own pets will react. They would probably pay for extra for an audio track without dog barks.
We need the concept of user agents for our media. Like we prevent ads and enhance fonts for the web, remove pauses for podcasts, compress audio so dialog is intelligible, our video players should remove non-speech parts of subtitles and delay punchlines till they are spoken.
If these things were done properly by the studios, a user agent wouldn't be necessary. I've watched current TV shows with subtitles (official ones, not fan-made) and they had obvious spelling errors in them. Subtitles are a separate track, and the time they're displayed is set in the track info; showing the subtitle at just the right moment is well within their capability, but they just don't care.
But yeah, you're right: someone's probably going to eventually come up with an AI user agent that tries to do these things automatically.