These offer customization like colors, text styling and positioning and are used to distinguish who is speaking or for karaoke subs and are now potentially being lost forever.

  • termaxima@slrpnk.net
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    11 hours ago

    Dammit, it was very useful to poison subtitle files for AI !

    Write immense amounts of garbage text outside the viewport. AI sees it, viewers don’t ! I believe there’s even a way to prevent screen readers from getting confused by it… It was great.

  • carrylex@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    > Use UNSUPPORTED subtitle format instead of one of the other 10 supported ones

    > Fast forward some time

    > YT disables and removes the UNSUPPORTED format

    >

    • ClamDrinker@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      While that’s true, it clearly worked and massive channels used it. So why is YouTube’s avoiding any responsibility and trying to kill it as quickly and silently as possible? Like, I get that sometimes you’ll have to drop support for things (even things you unofficially support), but there should be a phase out period during which people can either backup and re-upload videos with those captions to preserve them. They could and should honestly provide a heads up for that or even help them out.

      Now they are literally decimating people’s hard work and on top of that pissing off actual partners. Not saying it will be successful, but cutting into people’s business like that is the kind of thing you can get sued over. So it doesn’t even make sense to take that risk from what we know.

      • carrylex@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        You can also use a power outlet with no grounding but don’t get surprised when your “buisness” burns down.

        • Bazoogle@lemmy.world
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          5 hours ago

          Except YouTube decided it’s going to light your “buisness” on fire because you aren’t using grounded outlets

    • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      9 hours ago

      More like unofficially supported. The fact that they worked points to the fact that they were quite literally supported.

      • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        Generally unsupported means “we will not provide support for this, you’re on your own if something goes wrong”

        Rather than “this will not work at all, we have ensured that”

  • morrowind@lemmy.ml
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    11 hours ago

    Didn’t crunchyroll recently do something similar?

    Wtf is going on, what do companies have against fancy subtitles

    • Washedupcynic@lemmy.ca
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      10 hours ago

      Crunchyroll subtitles are absolute dogshit now. I am mad enough to cancel my account. Fucking sad that pirating will get me a better product than the one I was paying for.

      • Imaginary_Stand4909@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        7 hours ago

        In the past my mom pirated anime while still paying for Funimation, because they had a quality service that got simuldubs and had a lot of content. Then CR bought them oit and now were stuck with this “pay for the highest tier to get all the content and no ads” and “oh it’s only on our platform until March!” and “Oops we didn’t even port over all the shows on Funimation, sorry lol!” and “Oh, like the AI generated subtitles?”

        We will not be giving CR a single fucking penny. I’m close to finishing my home/media server and we’ll just watch that way or with Kodi.

  • carrylex@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    While I’m not quite sure about the exact reasons for the removal, here are some probable guesses:

    • it’s a bug
    • the unsupported, internal format - that allows for pretty much everything - is in some way exploitable
    • It’s getting replaced by something better/standardized as the current solution doesn’t seem to always work properly in YT’s apps
    • Lyrl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 hours ago

      the unsupported, internal format - that allows for pretty much everything - is in some way exploitable

      It prevents AI summaries of the video from including all the video content. Obvious solution: remove the information missing from the summary from the video itself. Now they match! /s

    • HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      9 hours ago

      On the last point, it’s probably not for something better or standardized, It’s gonna be to push the AI captioning and dubbing.

      • carrylex@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        What have auto-generated/AI caption contents to do with the general format captions???

        YT has auto-generated captions now for years, so why would they remove an unsupported, internal format because of that?

  • Auster@thebrainbin.org
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    12 hours ago

    Because God forbid using anything other than their own generated subs. Or to have options.

    If that’s a push to their AI systems, while AI has its uses, when coincidences or fuck ups are too consistent, it may not be either anymore. And thus it feels like Google is trying to tarnish AI to the point even supporters move away from it.

  • guy_threepwood@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    I have random issues with youtube subtitles in general. I often watch foreign language videos, occasionally for learning. Except sometimes whilst they work in the video’s language, the translations don’t…until I reload the page, or quit the browser. Or on specific computers which never have issues. 🤷‍♂️