{"id":563,"date":"2008-05-18T22:20:52","date_gmt":"2008-05-19T06:20:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/alternate-subtitles\/"},"modified":"2008-05-18T22:20:52","modified_gmt":"2008-05-19T06:20:52","slug":"alternate-subtitles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/alternate-subtitles\/","title":{"rendered":"Alternate Subtitles"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kostya recently lamented<\/a> the matter of subtitle quality. I admit that subtitles are not a topic that I have traditionally cared very deeply about, popular though they may be in the multimedia scene. All the media I care about is generally already in English. Apparently, I’m one of the rare geeks who absolutely detests anime, so I have no reason to care about fansubs for media “imported,” one way or another, from certain Pacific islands.<\/p>\n

However, some time ago, I suddenly found a reason to care about subtitles. It turns out that subtitles don’t have to<\/em> contain bad translations. I’m a huge fan of the old TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000<\/em><\/a> (a.k.a. MST3K). In a nutshell, the silhouettes of a guy and his 2 robot puppets make fun of rotten movies. They crack an incredibly wide variety of jokes and it’s unlikely anyone can understand every one of them. Leave it to a collaboration of internet geeks to develop an annotation project<\/a> where users can submit quotes and annotations corresponding to particular timecodes in the lousy movies. These annotations go into a database where they can be downloaded as plaintext .srt subtitle files<\/a>.<\/p>\n


\n\"VLC
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“Now what we’re doin’ here, Bob, is gettin’ killed by a werewolf.”<\/em><\/a>
\n<\/center><\/p>\n

Pictured is an annotation I added for episode 0904 – Werewolf<\/a><\/em>. This is nothing new in the context of DVDs — I remember watching a popup trivia subtitle track on the Spider-Man<\/a><\/em> DVD. But I’m wondering if there are other annotation projects like this one out there on the net for other niche areas of interest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kostya recently lamented the matter of subtitle quality. I admit that subtitles are not a topic that I have traditionally cared very deeply about, popular though they may be in the multimedia scene. All the media I care about is generally already in English. Apparently, I’m one of the rare geeks who absolutely detests anime, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t