Subtitles appearance / location

General Discussion
1

This issue has come up a few times, in various threads, but most of those threads are over a year old, so I thought I’d start a new one as my comment almost a year ago in an old random thread about subtitles never seemed to get any response.

Currently, we can toggle subtitles on or off, and in appearance, chose font and size. The boxes labelled text color and background color both contain 8 choices, all white on solid black, and even assuming this might be a bug in the appearance dialog, changing the option seems to have no effect.

For people who are actually studying the language rather than just watching the drama, it is incredibly useful to see both sets of subtitles. When a drama has hard subs, the subtitles always cover the hard subs in a really annoying way. If I want to look up a word or phrase, I have to pause, toggle off the subs (there also doesn’t appear to be a keyboard shortcut for this which would help), at which point I can read the hard subs, and then have to re-enable the subs again to get back to English. And really, I’d prefer to primarily use the hard subs and only use the viki subs when I don’t understand the meaning (which sadly for historical dramas is a lot of the time) so really I do want both at once, not an awkward way of switching between them.

Last time I mentioned this problem, I suggested the option of allowing viki’s subs at the top of the screen instead of the bottom, so they would stay separate.

But the other day, for a couple of episodes, there seemed to be a bug in the player than give me English subs white on transparent instead of white on black. Such a joy! I could finally read both sets of subs at once, although occasionally they overlapped and it was a bit hard to read, but overall still better than having the black background. Sadly, after rebooting, the settings seem back as they were before… :frowning:

Just fixing the colour selction options and allowing opaque would be an easy win, but really if we could position the subtitles anywhere on the screen, that’d be even better.

Is there any chance this can be addressed in a future upgrade? It’s obvious viki sees the value in having both subtitles in learning mode, but it wouldn’t need a huge change to provide a lot of benefit in the many dramas with hard subs but no learning mode.

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2

Actually, I just thought I’d try other random options and hit F5 again. This time the subtitle appearance box does contain different colours and they do seem to work. Except the first one which is obviously intended to be opaque (it has the checkerboard pattern), but is still a black background instead…

3

Where do you see that? I don’t have any options to change text color or font. Working or otherwise … :thinking:

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4

There will probably no change of subtitles location, since either you would need to place it in the middle of the screen. You won’t be able to watch the drama or do you think of watching it for the drama and then re-watch for the subtitles to learn?
The top of the screen is no option either since timed comments are in that area.
I remember having this discussion before related to hearing impaired, but unfortunately lead nowhere.

I see that you are aware of the learn mode, so for the moment, I don’t know what you want to gain here. It might be a topic for Viki ideas to improve the service.
https://support.viki.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/115000556227

Just a suggestion.

@mirjam_465
When you watch an episode and click on the subtitle button on the screen you should see the line subtitle appearance … Clicking on that should bring up the options of color and background for subtitles.

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5

i would love to have bigger subs. every time i choose big and save this… nothing happens and this is since months ago so. changing the colour i have no probs with, but just the size won´t change.

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@teufelchen_netty_266 Did you try -small- and then -big- again. It worked for me in the past, since then I had no more trouble with the subtitles size.

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Japp, japp.
Doesn’t work

8

Sorry for the late reply, I’ve been fairly busy recently.

Timed comments are noise I can easily live without, and usually do most of the time. The top of the screen is the perfect place for secondary subtitles.

Although, even if the middle of the screen was the only other alternative, to me that’s a much more useful location than on top of the Chinese hard subs. But obviously, the top is more useful still.

But I don’t see why you think it has to be a one-size-fits-all solution. Rather than just an on-off and “timed comments must be at the top, subtitles must be at the bottom”, I just want to be able to decide where to put things, as that’s much more important choice than colour and size.

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