Comments on: Subtitles, the iTunes Store, and Swedish vampires

By: downtempo

downtempo — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 22:52:35 +0000

chris, great seeing you the other evening. i'd love to try this subtitling solution out. drop me an email at my email personal address (my first name at downtempo.net) and let's talk about it!

By: Chris McCall

Chris McCall — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:39:26 +0000

"what the world needs is a solid universal subtitles standard that supports int'l character sets, colors, positioning, and everything else that global subtitle audiences demand"

The world is getting that, thanks to a subtitle repository/webservice I'm cooking up on Mono right now. I'll get with you next week when there's a public URI for it. It supports streaming and styling, so far. Stay tuned!

By: downtempo

downtempo — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 17:31:02 +0000

thanks for the feedback, chris! it's actually even more complicated than i first thought when i wrote this blog post. i blurred the line between "closed captioning" and "subtitles", which while usually related, are somewhat different from each other. iTunes has support for closed captioning, but almost no video titles with closed captioning. iTunes has *no* support for subtitles unless they're burned into the video content itself (which means no on/off switch for subtitles!). i don't know if i got the version of the DVD that has "ruined" subtitles, but i thought my subtitles were pretty good. but iTunes would be a great platform for distributing "corrected" versions of movies. they've done this in the past for episodes of TV shows that had video encoding errors. i hadn't tried out Plex before - just checked it out and it looks pretty cool, and there's a nice MacWorld review of Boxee and Plex that reviews these together. too bad none of them can stream Apple's protected video content from my library! what the world needs is a solid universal subtitles standard that supports int'l character sets, colors, positioning, and everything else that global subtitle audiences demand. if anyone has seen one that fits these demands, i'd appreciate it if you could add a comment and let us know.

By: Chris McCall

Chris McCall — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 02:30:44 +0000

"As any good fan of foreign films (or kung-fu movies) knows, dubbing can really ruin the experience of a great foreign-language film. Subtitles are definitely the way to go."

You would think, right? Google "let the right one in ruined subtitles". The DVD release has some kind of awful retranslation of the subtitles that ruined the movie. I think the transcription is from the dubbed English audio everyone was complaining about.

" installing Boxee on my Apple TV is the way to go for watching free streaming web content"

I use Plex. Both are ports of XBMC, which runs only so-so on Apple TV, according to a friend of mine who isn't delighted with the performance or stability of Boxee on it. Plex is more focused, with none of the social features, so maybe it's more frugal with resources.

Anyway, good post. I was wondering out loud just yesterday why no one has written an iTunes plugin that allows you to stream subtitles from a URL.