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Legitimately one of my favourite YouTube channels. Tech deep dives (generally on extremely esoteric topics), sarcasm, and interesting insights.
Alec is also (unsurprisingly) on the Fedi: https://mas.to/@TechConnectify
kind of.
He mostly left because of bullying. Just posting video updates and rare posts.
Who the fuck is bullying this guy? I will round up a goddamn posse, Alec is a treasure.
Fediverse being fediverse.
For large accounts it's a genuine toxic cesspit.
Scroll back to a year ago and you can regularly see posts from him where he calls people out.
small sample from just scrolling through:
https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/112995372890737651
https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/112995177480955078
But that's just the stuff he openly shows
Thats just social media.
Which is why social media shouldnt exist. cause its not good for anyones health.
How is this bullying not moderated? That just seems weird. I've always felt Mastodon kinda fails at moderation in this aspect. He should go to Lemmy instead.
His Bluesky is also a delight
shouldnt it be @TechConnectify@mas.to ?
Weird. Doesnt work somehow...
Piracy has none of these problems.
Once again, playing by the rules is a worse experience.
It really depends on the ripper. I'd say 9/10 times captions are included on most of my downloads.
It's that 10th one that is super annoying and I have to wait for jellyfin to download them one by one from open subtitles.
As a ripper myself for one of the internal groups, both DVDs and Blu rays have this annoying thing where they include the subtitles in image format (PGS for BRs, forgot what the DVD one was). It’s a headache for the rippers and encoders because we then need to OCR the subtitles for the encodes we put out there. Sometimes if we get lucky the movie is on a streaming platform making this process obsolete as we grab the .vtt files from the streaming service and sync it with the BR we’re making (as well as transforming it to .srt) . My only assumption as to why MPAA decided on image format subs for both DVDs and BRs is because it makes it easy to deal with different languages and the likes, you just display a static image and fk everything else. But for the people putting out quality releases if we ship PGS that means we’re just doing a bad job.
Support your fav trackers (and their internals!)
I spent my college days ripping and manually correcting OCR'd subtitles for more movies than I care to count in the early 2000s. Do you mean to say I could have monetized it?
Also, fuck lower case Ls and upper case is
Highly doubt you can monetize it. Most groups do it as a hobby because they care about preservation. Internal groups don’t lack the time or storage space. What we do lack is dedicated BluRay rippers from distant regions.
Oh damn, I had no idea that's why a lot of movies had OCR issues with my subtitles. I knew the information, and I had this problem, but I never put it together to realize that it had to be OCRd.
Unsung hero right here.
Thank you for your service.
I rip for my personal collection/data hoarding and was surprised to learn how much of a pain PSG subs are. I figured I just had HandBrake configured wrong until I started looking into it.
Yeah, really makes you wonder if it’s by design as some sort of evil anti piracy measure.
dvd should be VOBSUB
And the downloaded ones are never in sync properly.
That's on you for loading the wrong kind.
ownership of media is getting left behind.
Legal ownership, that is
🏴☠️
DVDs are getting left behind.
30 years old next year 😭
DVD's are getting old. Rate of degradation due to manufacturing inperfections is about 1:10 in public library.
I like putting the thing in the thing
Me too.
I'm surprised VLC fares that badly with CCs encoded this way. Usually it's pretty good. I'm also now wondering if ffmpeg also shares the same problem
Because of the way those captions are stored VLC has to use OCR to convert the .SRT file (which basically stores low resolution b/w images I assume to easier allow for different alphabets) to normal text. I don't know why the open source solutions are so bad at this (especially considering how good the proprietary solutions seem to be) but I had similar problems ripping a DVD. I would assume that had he turned off the special font VLC uses for the subtitles and instead just seen the raw data there wouldn't have been a problem. Why VLC doesn't enable this by default (/ have this) I don't know.
This is not about DVD subtitles, which are images as you say. This is about "Line 21" closed captioning. I.E. the text data that is embedded in an analog tv signal. There should be no OCR needed.
There is no .srt in this case. This is also not about bitmap dvd vobsubs.
The top Youtube comment by Ridley Combs explains it pretty well:
FFmpeg maintainer here, and the details behind the caption decoding issues you're seeing in VLC are complex and horrific. They largely stem from how the EIA-608 caption format expects text to be laid out in a monospace grid onscreen, which isn't really how the text rendering stacks used for modern subtitling work (this is probably why changing the font caused problems on those Sony players); beyond that, the behavior can just end up pretty complex, and there's no convenient public-domain corpus of sample files for open-source software developers to test against. These kinds of issues also affect the Japanese (ARIB) and European (Teletext) formats to varying extents. These days, a lot of the focus ends up being on converting the text into modern Unicode text formats, styled using modern techniques, so direct rendering of the legacy formats hasn't had as much attention lately.
After watching his video it feels like it was already left behind.
What is the "it" that you think got left behind?
I meant that in the video it's consistently not worked for a very long time. Seems the switch to HDMI left it behind. While it would be nice if devices supported it like he asked, the fact it was skipped in the HDMI standard and not mandated by law means it's unlikely devices racing too the bottom line will ever care. And that's basically what we see. Only the most expensive devices even acknowledge it's an issue.
That said, I hope VLC devs see his video and improve things. I'm sure it's more complicated then it seems but it would be cool for them to add that to the ways they're better than every other player put there.
Honestly, physical media formats in general have been left behind decades ago at this point.
reads meta data 1st We gotta get Alec to show up on William's chaos ranch for an episode of Farmer's with Brain Damage. If anyone can get 1 ~~million~~ billion Sunflowers to grow in sand and not get eaten by Kevin's dog it'll be Alec.
Now I'll watch the video. I'm sure it's good. It's always good.
edit: Yep. Interesting.
I think, it's not very expensive or difficult to find work around solutions to the few people holding onto standard definition media.
You're taking about bringing a man of control and order into that den of chaos and goblinry? I don't think Alec would enjoy it.
There's two parts to this; the dvd player and the video player in the TV (or if it's a HDMI player, in the players firmware).
this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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