Hacker News Reader

Comment by wdb | Hacker News Reader

It's all starting to get expensive. The content on Netflix keeps disappearing without warnings. Half the time you have subtitles in a limited number of languages. Also they now started adding games, why do I need to pay extra for games I never subscribed for or even want? Make it a add-on or something.

For example, Netflix DE has subtitles but the Netflix UK won't have the same German subtitles available. Disney+ is doing this better by offering the nearly all subtitles nearly all the time. I can understand that dubbed audio might not be available on other country Netflix' but the subtitles?

Sometimes I am too tired to listen to English and prefer to read subtitles :)

View on HN

Also the German subtitles are often very different from the German audio, apparently translated by completely different people. Makes it very annoying to watch with subtitles on.

Sometimes I am thinking they are community translated like on Rakuten Viki

Same goes for English too, my partner has a processing disorder with speech and needs subtitles to help her, and Netflix subtitles are among the worst we've ever experienced. Not just minor mistakes but completely different sentences that change the entire meaning of the conversation/scene. It's become an ongoing joke for us in our day to day watching, but is also annoying enough that if she actually cares about the show/movie we end up torrenting it purely for the better subs available.

It can get a bit impossible. I recently wanted to watch Don't Look Up with Croatian audio (am Croatian, I know it's stupid but I thought it would be funny) and Chinese subtitles (because that's my GF's first language), but it is not possible. If I am on my Croatian profile I can use Croatian audio but not Chinese subtitles. If she is on her profile she can use Chinese subtitles but not Croatian audio.

I get that it's a UX thing because most people aren't interested in Swahili subtitles, but it would be nice to have an option to expand the list since I know they have the data.

You need to add language you understand in your profile for most of the subtitles to appear. This can only be done through the desktop website.

> I can understand that dubbed audio might not be available on other country Netflix' but the subtitles?

Subtitles are absolutely limited by region by the studios as part of stopping people VPNing around to access titles that haven't been paid for in that region.

Don't think subtitles are the reason people would use VPNs ;) If VPNs are the problem than Netflix should do a better job blocking them

This subtitle thing is a real mess.

Netflix content that is available in .nl and .br (I'm in .nl, my wife speaks pt-br) only have a couple of subtitles (english, german, sometimes dutch) and the same content in .br has totally different set of subtitles.

appletv+ and disney+ and amazon prime simply offer all available subs. So it's not a UI issue, simply have a look at how they do it.

And then they wonder why people pirate and use opensubtitles/legendas.tv ? Should be really really easy for them to fix.

You need to set your UI language to get access to more subtitles in Netflix. My wife is Thai and Thai subtitles only show when the UI is set to Thai.

Prime is worse. I actually watched the movie The Courier with English subtitles on and the subtitles disappeared for all of the Russian dialogue.

I've heard you can sometimes work around this by changing your profile language. Have you tried setting it to German?

Seems daunting to need to switch profile language's for this?

Netflix only shows audio/subtitle tracks that are in languages they think are relevant to you.

But nowadays you can configure additional visible languages yourself on the language settings page (checkboxes under "Programmes & Films Languages") without changing the UI language: https://www.netflix.com/LanguagePreferences

Seems silly to me not to list all available languages. I would have never known this if you didn’t tell me. I didn’t slipped my mind to consider its a Profile Settings thing.

Apparently it was done for UX reasons: https://www.quora.com/Why-arent-all-subtitles-available-in-a...

But that seems weird to me - just show the more relevant languages first, then, so they don't need too many button presses.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com