This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
ownership of media is getting left behind.
Legal ownership, that is
🏴☠️
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.
Who the fuck is bullying this guy? I will round up a goddamn posse, Alec is a treasure.
Fediverse being fediverse.
For large accounts it's a genuine toxic cesspit.
Scroll back to a year ago and you can regularly see posts from him where he calls people out.
small sample from just scrolling through:
https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/112995372890737651
https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/112995177480955078
But that's just the stuff he openly shows
His Bluesky is also a delight
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!)
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.
Oh damn, I had no idea that's why a lot of movies had OCR issues with my subtitles. I knew the information, and I had this problem, but I never put it together to realize that it had to be OCRd.
Thank you for your service.
dvd should be VOBSUB
Unsung hero right here.
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.
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.
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.
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
In those situations I usually enable 1.5x.
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.
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.
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).
