(Technology Connections) Closed captions on DVDs are getting left behind [33:46]

Legitimately one of my favourite YouTube channels. Tech deep dives (generally on extremely esoteric topics), sarcasm, and interesting insights.
- Alec is also (unsurprisingly) on the Fedi: https://mas.to/@TechConnectify
  
  kind of.
  He mostly left because of bullying. Just posting video updates and rare posts.
  
  His Bluesky is also a delight
  
  shouldnt it be @TechConnectify@mas.to ?
  Weird. Doesnt work somehow...

Piracy has none of these problems.
Once again, playing by the rules is a worse experience.
- It really depends on the ripper. I'd say 9/10 times captions are included on most of my downloads.
  It's that 10th one that is super annoying and I have to wait for jellyfin to download them one by one from open subtitles.
  
  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!)
  
  And the downloaded ones are never in sync properly.
  
  If you run your own server you can have a look at bazarr.
  
  Have a look at Bazarr.

ownership of media is getting left behind.
- Legal ownership, that is
- 🏴‍☠️

DVDs are getting left behind.
- 30 years old next year 😭
- DVD's are getting old. Rate of degradation due to manufacturing inperfections is about 1:10 in public library.

I like putting the thing in the thing
Me too.

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.
- 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.
  
  There is no .srt in this case. This is also not about bitmap dvd vobsubs.

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.
- Got to get the special edition for that extra $tuff.

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.
- It's not just the information for me, he's also passionate about the stuff that he explores and that comes across in his videos.
  
  Abaolutely, but I have other things to do I end not getting to watch them
- 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.
- Yeh that half hour video could have been 5 minutes. Never seen him before but enjoyed his style and how he explains things, but it felt like he said the same thing over and over again 6 times.
  
  I enjoy his work but it can get excessively long winded at times. Not necessarily five minutes but tighter for sure.

All my DVD's stopped working when I moved to another country anyway.
- 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.
  
  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.

reads meta data 1st We gotta get Alec to show up on William's chaos ranch for an episode of Farmer's with Brain Damage. If anyone can get 1 ~~million~~ billion Sunflowers to grow in sand and not get eaten by Kevin's dog it'll be Alec.
Now I'll watch the video. I'm sure it's good. It's always good.
edit: Yep. Interesting.
I think, it's not very expensive or difficult to find work around solutions to the few people holding onto standard definition media.
- You're taking about bringing a man of control and order into that den of chaos and goblinry? I don't think Alec would enjoy it.

After watching his video it feels like it was already left behind.
- 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.
  
  Honestly, physical media formats in general have been left behind decades ago at this point.

There's two parts to this; the dvd player and the video player in the TV (or if it's a HDMI player, in the players firmware).

DVDs have already been left behind so not much of an issue.
- Someone didn’t watch the video
  
  Correct, because anything related to DVDs as the title suggests is wholly irrelevant in 2025.
  Watching now - I’m in PAL land so line 21 captions were never a thing for me.
- You would be surprised but in the US DVDs are still king. They sell far better than regular BluRays and even better than 4K UHD BRs. So saying it’s dead is difficult.
  
  One format selling better than another dead format is hardly a useful data point.
  
  Blu-ray is dead too. It died even quicker. Both of their sales are circling the drain.