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.