
Ask HN: Why is Netflix oblivious to films broken by lack of forced subtitles? - OJFord
I&#x27;ll be honest, I&#x27;m a paying customer hoping someone here works at Netflix and thinks this is as ridiculous as I do. I&#x27;ve previously tried and failed with the old Twitter-rant technique.<p>Many Netflix films that are predominantly English have sections of some foreign language that would be a &#x27;forced subtitle&#x27; (a feature intended exactly for this, when you&#x27;re watching with lang X audio and no subtitles, but part of the dialogue is in lang Y due to content of the film) on a DVD release, but aren&#x27;t on Netflix.<p>I&#x27;m watching &#x27;Norman&#x27; at the moment, and I just sat through several minutes of Hebrew (while watching in English). &#x27;English [CC]&#x27; subtitles have no affect, but if my French weren&#x27;t so appalling I could have turned those on and followed along.<p>I&#x27;ve seen it so many times now, I just don&#x27;t understand how this has not only been overlooked, but also isn&#x27;t a widely complained about issue.
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klingonopera
I think I know what you're talking about, are they really called "forced
subtitles"?

...because otherwise I'd rather suggest the term "necessary subtitles", and
yes, I've encountered that phenomena a few times while watching online
streams, not just on Netflix.

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rolph
Hard Coded subtitles i think. Meaning its part of the stream and not injected
into the container as a subtitle stream.

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OJFord
No, that's not what I meant, I believe it's implemented as a separate subtitle
stream with a flag set to indicate it's to be forced.

[https://www.jbistudios.com/blog/what-are-forced-subtitles-
in...](https://www.jbistudios.com/blog/what-are-forced-subtitles-in-video-
translation)

~~~
rolph
ok i get it now, I Think you can mux them in if you have something like the
VLC, but the cart is before the horse, if its for your own viewing.

There was a place around where you can obtain subtitle tracks of all sorts.

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OJFord
I'm not sure what you mean? I'm annoyed that Netflix omits them, if I was
using VLC yes it would be on me to add them if I wasn't watching from a DVD/BD
(but at least I could!).

The film I was watching ('Norman') had whole scenes where the dialogue was
exclusively Hebrew (I assume) on the primary (English) sound track, and even
manually enabling English [CC] subs didn't help (I knew to try because I've
seen it before).

The film was definitely not meant to be that way, and if I'd been watching on
disc it wouldn't have been.

~~~
rolph
if you want to make a hobby out of it so others can enjoy your labours, there
is a way to unpackage the stream contents with a subtitle stream, and then
package it up again. there is/was a website that offers subtitle streams, and
there is still subtitle editor/creators around so you can roll your own
subtitles.

