Saturday, January 07, 2023

"Captain Phillips" on HBO Max Has Broken Subtitles

Looks like the on-screen subtitles of Somali dialogue in “Captain Phillips” (2013) are broken on HBO Max in the U.S. Scenes in Somalia feature no on-screen subtitles (even when English CC is ON), unlike the English Blu-ray and DVD versions of the film which show the lines of dialogue in English.

Most likely, this is similar to the "Schindler's List" issue on Peacock (which has since been fixed!). The issue: two versions of the English-language-native movie are made available to the streaming service, a textless version for international use, and a version with English subtitles where appropriate burned into the movie (as was seen in English movie theaters upon initial release).

The textless version of the movie is used for streatming in non-English localities and the local language is subtitled with on-the-fly on screen graphics. The problem might be that HBO Max is serving the textless version of the film for English localities, like the United States.

view on YouTube

Originally pointed out by @FifthCrichton 

update Jan 8 2023: HBO Max has replicated the issue and has opened a ticket for it to be fixed.

Original tweet: https://twitter.com/tvaziri/status/1611765331911147521


update Mar 24 2023: HBO Max has fixed the problem!







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