Hacker News Reader

Comment by whitepoplar | Hacker News Reader

For popular, public content, you could split the price amongst many buyers, like Kickstarter.

I wish I could do this with subtitles! I hate waiting years for subtitles to TV series and obscure movies to become available. Ones in European languages mostly e.g. Cordon season 2 has been out for years, no English subs available. Latest season of Rita, out for a year, no English subs. The Colombian Ugly Betty, impossible to find many years later. I waited a couple of years for the latest season of Engrenages etc.

Maybe there could be a fixed priced online, which you could contribute towards. I won't pay for movies/tv now, but I'd sure pay for subtitles! Divided between many people, it wouldn't cost much. Not sure how to ensure high quality subs.

(I contributed to doing subs on viki years ago, which seemed like a good thing, but it disappeared, taking all the subtitles with it.)

That already exists in a more private form, on sites specialized in smaller movies there’s usually a “subtitle pot” where people can donate their points / upload credit and the person who does the subtitles then receives that bounty once work is done. Usually they leak out to the rest of the internet pretty quickly after that.

Oh, I had't heard of that. I haven't consulted my friend Google yet, but could you name some of those sites? Thanks.

That's one of them: https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/weekend-post/karagarg...

Thanks! Hmm does sound a bit inaccessible though, and for obscure classics, not really what I had in mind: "Karagarga is a members-only torrent tracker. That is to say it is a file-sharing archive closed to the public and accessible by exclusive invitation alone. These coveted invitations are given out to only the highest ranked users(VIP and Uploaders)."

Subtitles are derivatives of copyrighted content, so publishing them without a license might get you sued, especially if you're charging for it.

Here's an automated transcript to start off with.

https://scribie.com/transcript/6946cef33e3c4e3596a819daaac73...

I had a look but the YouTube transcript is more accurate. Compare:

"Why combinator has the people who wrote a mail and email?"

from that and

"Y Combinator has the people who wrote Yahoo Mail and Gmail"

from the YouTube transcript for example.

Yeah, our language model needs some work. We're constantly improving our engine though. Since we are manual transcription service, we can feed back the hand-made changes by humans back into our model and re-train it. Thanks for checking it out!

No worries. You do punctuation better than youtube. I was wondering if you could do a hack which kind of combined the two results. Youtube must be doing something kind of sophisticated to get things like "Paul Buchheit" correct like doing a pre search of people connected with Paul Graham.

Yeah. We can actually do that. We do have a prototype of that in the works.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com