Article tagline: “Just the dialogue—no sound effects or music cues.”

Do any HNers find those cues sufficiently distracting that they’re excited about this feature? I always have subtitles on. While I find those cues occasionally amusing, I’ve never found them to be an impediment to my enjoyment. Maybe they are for people who read slowly? Or because they break the fourth wall?

Frankly, I'd rather that content producers and their sound mixing and mastering engineers just improve the audio levels of their dialog tracks in relation to the rest of the mix. I already have my center audio channel goosed +3db beyond the professionally calibrated academy reference levels to help with legibility. The problem is that mixes are increasing in dynamic range, so if I elevate the center channel level (where most dialog is) even more to lift the occasionally inaudible utterance, some of the rest of the center channel content is too loud in relation to the other channels.

While my high-end home theater audio system has DSP functions like dynamic compression which I can apply to smooth out the center channel, that's relying on a blanket algorithm in an attempt to fix something that's much better fixed on the mixing stage in the first place. The mixing engineers have much better tools which they can selectively apply when needed and even have the option of problematic dialog being re-looped if necessary. It's their job to get this right and they certainly have the all the tools and training to do it properly and only when, and as much, as actually necessary. Having home viewers slap some auto-mode plug-in over the entire run time of a sound mix that was painstakingly hand-mastered scene-by-scene is objectively the worst way to solve the problem.

This simply makes no sense because the entire modern signal chain is digital. There's no technical reason the gain shouldn't be correct. The fact that dialog audio levels are still a recurring problem in my properly calibrated, 11.2.4 THX-rated dedicated home theater must be that the audio engineers aren't being given the time and resources to do their job properly or are being instructed to do this as some misguided aesthetic choice (looking at you Christopher Nolan).

People very much need this. Making them visually more fitting, less distracting, would be a nice next step.

This won't replace the mixer I run my audio through, though. A bit of a pain, and you need a mixer, but try it if you can.

Wait, is this really a new thing...? I could've sworn I've seen it in streaming services before, where you could choose between dialog only and closed captioning. One is usually called "English" and the other is "English SDH" or similar, where SDH is "subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing". It's the exact difference this article points out (sound effects and music etc., as opposed to just dialog). https://www.3playmedia.com/blog/whats-the-difference-subtitl...

Video games have also had this as an explicit option for many years, maybe decades (Half Life 2 comes to mind).

Not only did Netflix not invent this, I could swear some of their shows have had it for years already...

>The performance style of actors in current TV shows and movies is more naturalistic and less elocutive than it once was, so characters are more likely to speak softly.

Yeah, I've given up on new movies. If I want naturalistic without a storyline, I can just go outside. I'm not going to turn the volume up to the level required to hear the mumbled whispers, just to have my hearing damaged by the next gunshot or blast of music.

Subtitles aren't a fix -- they're distracting and therefore annoying. A selectable "classic" audio track would be the fix.

Oh my goodness it only took like ten years but they finally did it!

The problem I frequently run into on various platforms is shows with some occasional foreign language that is meant to be subtitled. I end up getting either no subtitles (and it takes me a while to realise that I'm meant to understand) or I turn subtitles on and suddenly all the English is subtitled too, which I don't want.

I don't get why this is complicated.

While YouTube still displays it word by word, forcing you to not look at the video.

Cheers to Netflix in the age of user hostile and anti ergonomic patterns (while they still have their fair share of sins in this area, at least one good news)

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A bit off-topic, but one gripe I had with some implementations of subtitles is when they’re delivering on the identity of a person before this was exposed. I don’t know why this happens that it would reveal <Name: Dialog> where it should instead be <Generic trait: Dialog>.

So instead of <Phil: Blah blah> it would be <Raspy voice: Blah blah>.

I don’t have examples for this, but it happens regularly that I noticed it as a trend. Might be because subtitles are outsourced and maybe the importance of exposition is not clear to the people creating the subtitles?

Boost spoken audio + adjust playback speed may get me to watch more movies and tv shows.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43788473