> DVD-with-unskippable-ads

A pet peeve of mine.

Fortunately, according to my religious beliefs, there is an extra circle in hell which addresses the issue. As hell goes, it's fairly benign, no fire or sulphur or pointy things, more like an open-plan office. The time that you spend there is equivalent to the cumulative amount of time that you made other people waste during the span of your earthly existence.

There are the small-time offenders, spending a few hours in limbo due to the queues which we skipped or the prank calls which we made during adolescence.

Also, there are the big fish. Like people who forced broken processes and flawed IT-systems upon large corporations, and are now spending decades trying to file requests of a computer mouse to IT departments in Kuala Lumpur, or filling out self-evaluation questionnaires comprising 380 questions.

The DVD people are there too, each with a TV set. Watching, in seemingly endless loops, the same anti-piracy alerts and ads for Barbie films designed to lower your IQ. How long have they been here, and how long will they stay? No one knows. Hey, there's another anti-piracy warning. Happy times.

> either you pay for the DVD-with-unskippable-ads

Blu-Ray seems to have avoided this slide into the adware sewer so far, which surprises me a bit. Maybe there's language prohibiting it in the spec, I dunno. They're not significantly more expensive than DVDs any more, either.

Unfortunately the content industry seems to be winning the war on ripping for BDs, so I've had to stop buying them for the time being.

To add to that, in large parts of Europe it's impossible to find showings that aren't dubbed, or don't have subtitles.

Dubbing ruins the movie entirely, and I find that I can't watch subtitled movies at all, I get obsessed with both listening to the dialog and comparing it with the translation.

Around here it costs me at least $300 to see a movie in its original unaltered format when it opens in theaters, i.e. a round-trip flight to the UK + hotel, so I just don't go.

I like soft-subbing. I prefer to watch Norwegian/Swedish/Danish/English content without subs - sometimes French and Japanese - although often I won't quite be able to follow everything.

For German, Italian and Spanish I generally need subs - and the same foes for Russian, Hindi and various Chinese and Korean content.

But even for Cantonese / Mandarin and also for animated content I prefer original audio with subs.

I recently got a Netflix account (in Norway) and just like the rest of the paid services, the selection is abysmal. I only hope these "new" big companies make a push to fix broken licencing - how else are we to increase global understanding if everyone just end up watching "their own" art - and remain forever sheltered from "foreign" influence?

Torrents aren't great - direct sharing between "librarians" like in the dc++/irc days were better. But torrents are way ahead of "legal" distribution.

It's extra sad as there's no technical reason, just people to stupid to figure out a way to organise compensation in a way that promotes cultural sharing.

I can't stand subtitles if I don't need them. Sometimes a video has captioning on by default, and I find I am totally unable to NOT read them. No matter how hard I try to ignore them, I end up spending all of my time staring at the captions and not seeing the actual video content.

And when they are useful to me, like an english translation... why doesn't anyone put the captions near the speaker's mouths, so I can read and see what's going on at the same time?

Eventually you learn to read and watch at the same time. It's harder to read the subtitle with peripheral vision, so indeed you end up focusing on the text if it's longer.

I also increase the font size (a lot) and add a slightly opaque black background to it -- again it helps to lower the amount of eye fixations.

For this (and obvious aesthetic) reasons, speech bubbles are a bad idea.

I've seen anime subtitles where characters are color-coded; I find to be distracting instead of helpful; the same with the italicized font when the line belongs to someone off screen. Though I'm sure one could argue it improves the accessibility for those having hearing disabilities.

Having grown with subtitles for all movies I watched since childhood, I think subtitles are the best compromise and no, I don't feel the need to keep reading if I understand the dialogue. Don't know how to explain it, it's very automatic.

For me it's dubbing that's absolutely awful, because I want to hear the real voices of the actors, plus I learned English and a little Italian and French by watching movies with subtitles. I don't understand countries where dubbing is the norm, I hope it never catches on in my country.

I also grew up with subtitles, and I agree they're the best compromise when you don't understand the dialog. But I never acquired the skill to ignore them once I understood what was being subtitled at a native level, and I really don't really understand how anyone could.

The human vision is drawn to quick changes & movement, when you have an otherwise immobile scene that's mostly just dialog subtitles will pop in & out, I can't help but focus on them just like I would if something else suddenly popped into the scene.

If you have words pop into your vision you also can't help but read them, at least I can't, subconsciously reading the translation and hearing the original version at the same time is really distracting.

I found the only way to deal with them was to position myself behind some sofa so I could only watch the top 3/4 of the screen, but of course you miss a big part of the movie that way.

Where in Europe is that? I live in Eastern Europe and we get most blockbusters in theaters the same day as US release date.