The article claims that you can slice up the video and only use language-specific hardsubs for parts that need it. I'd be interested if there are technical reasons that can't be done.
The article claims that you can slice up the video and only use language-specific hardsubs for parts that need it. I'd be interested if there are technical reasons that can't be done.
To be more specific, basically all online streaming today is based around the concept of segmented video (where the video is already split into regular X-second chunks). If you only hardsubbed the typesetting while keeping the dialogue softsubbed (which could then be offered in a simpler subtitle format where necessary), you would only need to have multiple copies of the segments that actually feature typesetting. Then you would just construct multiple playlists that use the correct segment variants, and you could make this work basically everywhere.
You can also use the same kind of segment-based playlist approach on Blu-ray if you wanted to, though theoretically you should be able to use the Blu-ray Picture-in-Picture feature to store the typesetting in a separate partially transparent video stream entirely that is then overlaid on top of the clean video during playback.
Technically it's possible.
We did do inlaid server-side ads that way for a while.
IT just takes an excessive amount of work.
The real solution is just the full support of ASS/TTML/VTT subtitles on all platforms. Usually smart devices are kind of only partially supported.
For instance - casting to a chromecast fallsback to SRT.
It's incredibly fragile at the CDN level if deployed at scale for a start.
You'd see playback issues go up by 1000%.
In the nicest possible way, it is pretty clear that this article was written by somebody who has only ever looked at video distribution as a hobbyist and not deploying it at scale to paying customers who quite reasonably get very upset at things not working reliably.
What would be the problems? When I’ve looked into streaming video before (for normal, non ripping reasons), I’ve noticed that most are already playlists of segments. You’d just need to store the segments that are different between versions, which should be better than keeping full separate versions which is what they apparently do currently.