Well becoming fed up with the amount of content on Netflix that has missing subtitles for non English speaking parts. So many films they have them missing and TV shows such as Homeland. It’s ridiculous. I just got off a chat with their support and they are hopeless did not really understand my issue. I know they can’t fix it themselves but they need to source better source. It’s not hard to find a master that has subs for English speaking and a clean one for when they need to add subs. Shows how little it really cares for content outside of what it creates where it would be a different story.
As a non-native speaker, i’m always a bit annoyed that the only option for English subtitles is for the hearing impaired, which means that all sorts of nonsense like “[JOYFUL MUSIC PLAYING IN THE BACKGROUND]” is added to the subtitles.
I wish they would just add normal English subtitles as well…
The translated versions for my own language are often quite poorly translated so i would rather have them in English, just to make out some of the parts better.
Yeah closed captions are the hard of hearing or deaf audiences hence why they have descriptions. Its how we have had to get around it. Was watching Geronimo recently and all the Apache sections and dialogue had no subs. A good 1/3 of the movie is in native Apache so it ruined what is a pretty good movie. All the Arabic on Homeland is missing so vital plot gets missed. I can’t believe no one’s noticed this high up and attempted to source subs.
Oh yeah! Long time irritation of mine.
So many movies been switched off because they can’t load a small Kilobyte language file.
It seems they assume the language of a region. Then they only load subs for that region. And if the subs don’t include the language that should have the foreign language subs you just don’t get it.
Yep that seem about right. Just a pain in the neck.
All the foreign language films or series I’ve watched have had English subtitles (viewing in British Isles). Maybe it’s a matter of what people watch…
Just finished Homeland Season 8 and noticed the same, lots of long strategic afghan scenes with no subtitles, thought it was a bit weird too, good season though and possibly the last apparently
Yeah it’s like at Netflix the idea that people move geographic locations are considered a myth.
It’s not that. It’s when a movie that’s in English has foreign language spoken as well. This should then have English subs but if the English track is not loaded you don’t get that.
It seems to be country dependant. French films and programmes that are subtitled on English in the UK are ‘broadcast’ without any subtitles here in France.
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Yeah. I’m in the Netherlands and while I speak Dutch it’s my third language.
So often I have to either watch a movie with Dutch subs all the way through or miss the foreign language parts.
I’ve checked this. No subs for foreign language in an English film, then I turn on the Dutch subs and it’s there.
Basically they said it’s what they get supplied from the studios and nothing they can do. I said then ask for something better that suits your customers as this is not good enough. I am sure studios want customers to view the materials as intended which includes subtitles for the foreign language parts.
What they appear to be getting in some instances as its not all films is an international master that would be sent to facilities to version it appropriately for the region it’s for. Netflix don’t seem to have the facilities to do this it seems. It does seem to be the most recent batch of older films they have added since lockdown that’s affected. So likely got loads as a job lot to boost content as so much is delayed.
This is true I had to watch the whole series with subtitles on for English and non English , no option for non English only sub titles.
We tend to watch in English (if original language) with Spanish subtitles but there are lots of films that don’t have Spanish subtitles, even though we connect to Netflix in Spain. The same films on disc have the subtitles.
I think two things have been mixed up here… and there is a limitation of the subtitle format on digital video.
Subtitling for a language is typically a transport stream in the MP2 / MP4 mux… and you select on your decoder or TV to display… but will display everything in your selected language… whether translating or for the hard of hearing,
There is also selective subtitling, but here the subtitling is typically hard encoded into the video… such as an English film with German spoken parts… where the German parts are displayed translated.
So the limitation is I can’t see on selective sub titling, how you choose which language you want to have selectively sub titled on your decoder… you would need either a complete English video or a separate German video.
They are getting international versions for a lot of releases which dont have hardcoded subs but are using these for all regions. They should be having two versions to stream. English speaking countries get the US/UK version with burnt in subs, the rest of the language world they stream the international version which is clean and you apply the inbuilt language subs.
It’s not hard to do this they are just not questioning it as they are low on new content and are trying to push anything. I used to work in the versioning part of the film industry so I know they all exist. They need to better at QC and ask the studios for more than just one version its in thier interests as well as I am sure the studios don’t want their product not being shown correctly and some are just ruined by this lack of foresight.
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Yes apparently Netflix uses two different subtitle systems, embedded SCC for closed caption English and Latin American Spanish, and TTML (which is an XML / web-format) for the rest.
Indeed there is much software out there aimed at creating sub titles or timed closed captions for your media, even specifically for Netflix, to embed in the transport mux… so really no excuse not to get right…
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