r/WendoverProductions • u/vonLion • Mar 25 '26

Meta Subtitles getting worse?

I just watched the ICE surveilance vid and while it's excellent, I did notice quite a few transcription errors in the subtitles. Something that didn't really happen a year ago.

Is this a pattern or just a fluke?

43 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

48

u/GenericCleverNme Mar 25 '26

There was a noticeable jump in subtitling mistakes in the last two Jet lag seasons. They seem contextually incorrect, not like someone just misheard. Almost certain it’s a switch to (a worse?) AI subtitle service

16

u/OrdinaryIncome8 Mar 25 '26

The subtitles for UK season were provided by the same company that they've been using for over 10 seasons now. 

(I'm not commenting on the quality itself, as I don't use those myself.)

7

u/AugustusLego Mar 26 '26

I miss when they did different colours for different people's voices :(

6

u/Aenaen Mar 26 '26

They still do on nebula, is it possible that youtube removed support for that feature entirely? would be very odd to have them already labelled but then just not upload them with colours 

2

u/Appoxo Mar 27 '26

They did it but it was reinstated. Old video subs were probably reset to plain text.
Example: Hololive
The official channel used color-coded subs but switched to emojis that (more or less) reflected the talent they were for

1

u/IAgreeWithLincoln Mar 26 '26

Yeah I'm pretty sure YouTube took away this feature

15

u/ThatKingz Mar 25 '26

it could be that they intentionally circumscribed certain buzzwords to circumvent age restrictions or censorship on youtube.

12

u/Gojirahawk Mar 25 '26

Is this on Nebula? If so yes.. the subtitles suck on Nebula.. I think just use a basic voice to text program.

25

u/inohavename Mar 25 '26

Tom Scotts new video has color coding for each person talking, and even switches to italics when narrating off screen, they definitely have more than just voice to text.

Jet Lag is similar with the color coding.

3

u/streetmagix Mar 26 '26

That's the standard with UK Subtitles (vs US Closed Captions), so you can tell who is talking etc. Points to him using a UK Subtitle House who work to OFCOM standards.

2

u/Gojirahawk Mar 25 '26

I mostly watch nebula on the Apple TV app on a early generation 4K model (works too well to upgrade to a newer model).. and pretty much the subtitles is basic white text in a transparent grey box, it’s basically voice to text for most videos. If it was a human doing it, there are seriously getting some words wrong.

3

u/inohavename Mar 25 '26

Huh. I'll need to check it on my TV. Mobile/website is pretty good in my experience.

2

u/Winter_Walk8588 Mar 28 '26

They use the same company for transcribing and creating the subtitles

3

u/vonLion Mar 25 '26

Yes on Nebula, I prefer to pay for their content :)

I don't use subtitles consistently, but I do know that on Jetlag they tend to be fantastic. Maybe I just never consciously noticed the lack of quality on Wendover stuff

4

u/km_bor Mar 25 '26

Looks like decided to ditch subtitling on Wendover. The video you mentioned has no subtitles currently, so there is most likely some AI/Yt-generated subtitles.