Quick question about subtitles - Page 2

Thanks for the kind words guys.

Maybe we should think about putting together an International Scope-Friendly Subtitles BD database? You think there would be enough interest to make it worthwhile?

I watched the double-bill of Night Watch and Day Watch on Blu-ray last night (both Fox releases). Night Watch is a 1.85:1 movie so no subtitle problems there.

Day Watch, however, is 2.40:1. Not only are there subtitles in the lower letterbox bar, there are even subtitles in the upper letterbox bar! This means that my normal trick of shinking the image to 2.17:1 and shifting the picture up just enough to read the lower subtitles doesn't work.

What kills me is that there is absolutely no reason to put subtitles above the picture. There's nothing going on at the bottom of the frame at those times. It's like they did it out of malice specifically to piss off CIH viewers.

I was thinking that my Oppo 983 allowed for subtitle repositioning, one of its many options. If it wasn't that it was my Onkyo 705, which seems less likely. Maybe I dreamed it, but I could have swore that the oppo did it. However, I did just wake up about 5 minutes ago so I may be mistaken. Anyone else have the 983 or 705 that could verify this for me?

DVD standard (i.e. raster image based) subtitles can be repositioned, but this is not the case for blu-ray. Blu-ray is a backward step in this respect thanks to BDA and Sony. This is further explained in the previous posts.

This could be absolute ignorance rather than malice. Blackbar haters would go crazy due to this type of appalling behaviour of the disk authors. In this manner they will not be able to attract non-native audiences to watch their movies. Studios should get the act together and develop human friendly guidelines for disk authoring.

Hi Cristobal, I am right behind you in hoping for future subtitle alternatives through BD-Live. In my case I want Greek. I pinged consumer@sphecustomersupport.sony.com a while back but no reply.

IMHO, When BD industry (SONY and others) builded the format and divide the world in regions ("A","B","C"), they don't care about people who share the same region with the english spoken area, and don't care about english spoken people who like foreign language movies
. In South America we would like to get CIH sistem at home. and that could be posible only with Scope-Friendly Subs. why (we user and customers) don't we ask for Scope-Friendly Subs as a standard in the industry , or any other alternative via software
sorry my bad english

The November issue of Home Theater magazine (now on stands) has an article about the problems with subtitles on 2.35:1 movies. Hopefully this will bring some attention to the issue.

It's a shame that the studios didn't simply adopt SSA/ASS subtitles which is a very powerful format that enables font styling, location, and other features. Since it's all in software it wouldn't be that hard to build an ASS decoder into the Java machine that BD disks employ. The decoding library libass is completely open source.

I suspect decisions like these reflect a "not invented here" mentality among corporations like Sony, not to mention that SSA/ASS subtitles are fast-becoming the standard among groups these corporation dislike, like anime fansubbers. Those annoying copyright issues come into play as well, since copyright in the translation can be independent of the copyright to the film itself.

I doubt any studio would want to advertise that its discs have "ASS Subtitles" on them.

Blu-ray specs supposed to support Java based ASCII subtitles which can be rendered by the player at the time of the play. Sony tried this ones but did not use again as it did not work consistently on all blu-ray players. I think this is due some screw up in the subtitle aspect of the BD-J specs. They should get the act together and fix this to enable ASCII based subtitles on future disks.

Meanwhile it is so easy to add two tracks one on the black bar and the other within the frame (if they think blackbar subtitle is a must).