God forbid they're a fraction of a second off

My hearing is fine, but I want to eat chips.
- That's how it starts, then a show doesn't feel right without subs

Just noticed that the text is in that warm yellow subtitle hue.

Subtitle offsets are like timezones to me. Early/late? The video or the subtitle. Ohh well I'll just move it in a direction and see, *subtitles disappear for a few seconds then appear again... * Stupid games.

The worst is when the audio itself is a fraction of a second off from the video. Literally unwatchable.
Thankfully VLC has the audio sync thing that is a god send.
- o_O TIL thanks.

Some movies dialog volume is soo wonked i can't hear any words without subs.
- ^{Hey, let me tell you this secret. Ellen is gonna}
  KABOOM
- I believe some TVs report that they have surround sound to streaming services despite really only having Stereo. On some services like Prime and (I think) Netflix you can manually choose the audio track. Give it a shot. It's not perfect, but it helps a good bit.
- I watched 28 Weeks Later last week, on my 5.1 system, and the mixing was absolutely atrocious. I was constantly adjusting the volume up to hear dialogue, only for a loud as fuck jump scare to blast out my ear drums.
  Completely ruined any enjoyment I would have gotten from it.
  
  There's tools to normalize audio in a movie. Dynamic range compression or something like the dynaudnorm filter in ffmpeg.

Or SLOWER than the movie. Correct the offset every five minutes or die.
- You can usually set both speed and offset of subtitles. Set both to default, time the first line correctly with offset, go one hour in, time this line correctly with speed. Takes some fiddling, but beats having to stop the movie every 5 minutes.

Slightly different but if anyone else uses Hulu on Firefox it tends to get worse and worse about a lag between the audio and video and needs to be refreshed. Very frustrating
- Oh I hate that' Almost worse than no subs'

God forbid you turn on the subtitles for a dubbed anime and now the words don't match what anyone is saying.
- I wonder if someone could make an ADA or CVAA complaint on that basis? Technically the dub isn't matching the captions, and as a result, someone who is hard of hearing isn't getting the same experience. Someone who is completely deaf won't have a bad experience, but someone who has a disability where they can't hear very well, or have problems comprehending spoken words might have a problem.
  
  Not deaf, but I've got an auditory processing disorder. If subtitles don't exactly match what I'm hearing I can't understand shit. It's like listening to two conflicting conversations at the same time.
- YESSS. Cells at Work on Netflix had this problem and I couldn't get past it. Why can't they just have two sets of subtitles and dynamically pick? Or even just like them both. Some content already has "Subtitles" and "Closed Captioning" separately. (Subtitles only has dialogue, closed captioning has sounds as well.)
- This happened when I decided to practice language by using the audio/subtitle options on Netflix. I ended up getting annoyed by the Spanish subtitles and spoken Spanish being different, and I couldn't do both simultaneously.
  Btw, some of the puns on Spanish-language Bojack Horseman are even better than the originals. The translation team must have been masters to be that on-point, consistently, throughout a show that practically breathes puns. (Well, puns and tragedy.)
  
  I remember when I was younger I loved the penguins of madagascar tv show. Watched it dubbed of course. Went to compare original to the dub like a year ago and the dub is just so much funnier it makes it inpossible to watch the original for me.
- Had this happen recently with Death Note. I kept seeing memes about the fuckin show so I watched a synopsis of it. I thought "Well that ending is stupid. I'll never watch it."
  5 hours later I found myself on the third episode like "Huh?"
  But I digress. I turned on the subtitles and was driven batshit insane. Wasn't worth the effort of trying to find ones that matched. Everything was the same gist but the wrong wording and I was losing my mind.
  
  You need "English CC". English subtitles are usually translated, whereas closed captions are taken directly from the english source. Drives me crazy too when a service has English but not English CC.
  
  When you dub, you have to find words that match the mouth flaps, but subtitles can say whatever.
- Even worse, you've got 2 autistic children that lose their minds every time the subtitles don't match or are poorly translated or whatever, and loudly exclaim over the next 10-15 seconds of the show (unless interrupted by another poorly matching subtitle).
  
  As an autistic man who gets sensory overload easily as hell, fucking nope. I would yeet the childs.
- Unless you have dubtitles

pray you fuckers never have to work in checking if a video is in sync with the audio source. (EDIT : because once you do, you start to notice slight drifts in video/audio sync)
Where the fuck do the players hide the option to change it, which stupid key did I press to nudge it back slightly so the plosives are miliseconds behind, I HAVE TO FIX IT BUT I AM WATCHING IN COMPANY BUT IT BOTHERS ME AND I DON'T WANT TO STOP
- VLC has an option...
  If you click "Tools" then "Track Synchronization" it allows you to delay or... speed up? Whatever the opposite of delay is... the audio by fractions of a second. A godsend. So many things would have been unwatchable otherwise.
  Seems like it also has a similar option for syncing up subtitles but I haven't used that.
  
  Oh yeah. It is one hundred percent posible. Because to nudge track sync back or forward , VLC has keyboard shortcuts. That are a single keystroke. THAT I KEEP HITTING BY ACCIDENT.
  #NO I DON'T KNOW WHAT KEY IT IS
- I haven't worked in the field, but oh boy do I ever notice it. Is it the player? The display? The receiver? I don't know, and I will fuck with it until it's tolerable... and then something drifts and I'm clawing at the walls again. Yes, something in my setup sucks, but the gear is all from 2017 and I'm broke. ¯(ツ)/¯
  My Xbox is connected to the 1080p/low latency HDMI port on my display, with the audio going over optical directly to my receiver, stereo only, foregoing 4K and surround sound for the express purpose of playing Rock Band with as little latency as possible. The two types of guitar and the drum set have slightly different optimal calibration settings in the game. The whole reason I bought a 360 over a PS3 back in the day was that the guitars were still wired, and trying to calibrate while playing on my friend's PS3 was next to impossible and spawned a lot of arguments.
  Today, that same friend contentedly watches content 1/4-1/2 second out of sync. And his wife prefers watching everything with subtitles. So I have to actively ignore both distractions and pretend everything's fine to be a good friend. 🫠

Poor sound balance in modern media is real, but so is auditory processing disorder. And the two together suck ass.
- I'm pretty sure poor sound balance in modern media is mandatory.
  
  Poor sound balance is 95 % bad downmixing.
  Going from 5.1 channels to 2 the media player should first bump up the center channel (the one for dialogue) a fair bit. But they don't because they use the coefficients from some manual from the fucking 1990s or whatever calibrated for expensive-ass headphones. Some players (e.g. Kodi) do have an option to amplify the center channel.
  The second issue is overly large dynamic range which is inappropriate in noisy environments or when someone may be sleeping nearby. That's easily solved with an audio compressor. My receiver has a "night mode" that does exactly that.
  Every streaming service should have both of those as easily toggleable options on their media players, but for some reason they don't. IDK if it's stupidity on their part or if their licensing contracts disallow "tampering" with the media or what it is but it would solve 95 % of audio balance complaints.

Decent video players (like VLC) have keys where you can adjust the subtitle or audio delay, so if you happen to get a sub track that isn't synced you can line it up manually

Wait is that a thing? For me the opposite is true, I can't focus on what's going on if there are subtitles. I'm always forced to read them somehow
- Yeah, same. For me, it’s better to simply not understand some words than have the distraction of subtitles on the whole time. Or when needed, just jump back a few seconds to hear it again.
- We are the same. I compulsively read any text on screen, and miss key visual details because of it. I only want subtitles on non-english speech and Christopher Nolan films
- Agreed, the only time I'd want subtitles are translations. And even then it's not optimal
- I can see that you don't have hearing damage. Cause I definitely do and can't hear shit out of one of my ears anymore. With subtitles on I can actually hear what I'm watching better.
  
  Not OP, but yes. My hearing is 20/20 and I can't be having with subtitles
- It's an audio processing disorder thing that some have (myself included). Once you get used to subtitles, you kinda don't focus on them unless you weren't sure exactly what they said. Which is often for me. They just kinda become a part of the audio... unless there's a delay, then they're distracting to me and I'll just blast the sound or watch something else
  
  There's also a lot of really bad mixing going on.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYJtb2YXae8
- I used to be the same as you. I guess having kids kind of forced me to start using them. It took practice to learn not to focus completely on the subtitles.
- Part of it for me is cuz i am a slow reader and i have rewind the video to read it again

My wife (American) needs subtitles to understand British shows.
- I (American) need subtitles to understand American shows.
  
  THIS
- I was watching The Ritual and I had trouble understanding the characters because they talk so quietly and their accents didn't help.

Finally an ADHD meme I cannot relate to.
I find subtitles super distracting.
- I used to, then I had a child.
  Nature.... ummm... finds a way.

I can't be seen without my glasses!
- Whoaaa, mama!

If you use Linux this works reasonably well to provide captions when there are none available
https://github.com/abb128/LiveCaptions?tab=readme-ov-file

It me.

People who are like this should really try to train their hearing better. You miss so much about the composition of a shot when you're reading subtitles.
Imagine if every painting in an art museum had a QR code pasted on top of it, or if every scenic overlook had glass you had to look through that had text explaining what it was you were looking at.
- Please explain to me how "training my hearing" will change the fact that my broken-ass brain fucking struggles to process spoken language. Subtitles are an accessibility thing, not a luxury thing done for shits and giggles.
  Also remember that there are people on this planet who are legitimately hard of hearing.
- I can listen to audio tracks and separate the instruments and listen to them individually, but still prefer subtitles due to the dogshit audio mastering most media offers these days
- You miss so much about the composition of a shot when you’re reading subtitles.
  After a while, you really don't... You eventually stop even realizing that you're reading.
  Also, the art thing you're describing is something completely different than subtitles. That's called "audio description" and it is a real thing that exists for people with vision problems.
  
  Sure bud.
  I bet you can also safely check your texts while driving without missing anything on the road.
- There are plenty of reasons for people to use subtitles that don't come down to poor hearing. I find a lot of TV and movies from Spain or France have really crap sound, for example, where dialogue is practically a whisper. I speak Spanish fluently and use it at work without issue for 40 hours a week, yet have an easier time understanding death metal lyrics than dialogue in some films and shows, for example. Somehow, Brazil figured out better sound design than most productions in either of those two countries, and I can watch Brazilian shows and films without having to turn on subtitles just fine.
  You also have assholes like Christopher Nolan, who insist on mixes that result in sound effects blowing out your ear drums before you can actually make out the dialogue, despite it being spoken in my native English.
  On the other hand, I find background noise much more disruptive to my comprehension in languages other than English, and would hardly be surprised if the same were true for those who speak English as a second language.
  Also, I guess by your logic, people who are deaf or hard of hearing should just accept that they can never fully appreciate this sort of media, due to relying on closed captioning.
  All around, it's just an incredibly ignorant comment.

It actually annoys me now that I have to go into the settings of every game just to turn the subtitles off
- The idea of playing a narrative game without subtitles gives me anxiety lol
- Okay Mr. Perfect Hearing and Focus
- For some reason, Amazon Prime randomly has German subtitles turned on for me.
  
  Holy shit, I'm not the only one???
  It only happened for me on one show, and only when the characters on screen were speaking Spanish instead of English.
  It had the hardcoded English translation, then a big "[SPEAKING SPANISH]" thing on top of that so I couldn't read it. Like yeah, no shit, how about you move so I can read the translation you asshole.
  Then at the top of my screen, just MASSIVE subtitles in German for some reason with no ability to turn them off.
  Almost the entire screen was filled with text, and I could only read "[SPEAKING SPANISH]".
  
  Probably your Alexa hearing you speaking in what it thinks is German.

KABOOM