Keeping the "hard subs" content is a lot of videos as the subtitles were encoded into the video stream.
This makes CDNs and other systems more difficult to utilize because we have a ton of video streams with just caption changes as opposed to just the Japanese audio source + caption files.
It's one of those things that doesn't seem that problematic till you include all the video_qualities to support streaming bandwith. So you also get a #hardSubLanguages * #videoQualities
I’m pretty sure it’s not too hard to implement an ASS → PNG renderer (especially considering vibe coding is now a thing). Then, just need to split out subs that can be actual text somehow from the ones that have to be overlays.
Apart from that... surely they could at least keep ASS subs for the players that support it, and serve “fallback” subs for low-end devices?
Only english is the most popular and just keep it. Most of the good hard subs are made for english and that is what people want.
It's really tough when you need to scale these things across 20 platforms.
