Netflix Subtitles, am I doing something wrong?

[Droolinggimp]

Watched Kill Bill last night on Netflix and had the subs off as normal, so just basic audio. Now, I am under the impressions that any foreign dialogue is subbed/hard coded on non subtitled shows/movies. I know previously when watching a film in English and subs off, the foreign audio was subbed. Now last night I had to turn on subs to see what the Japanese were saying. Is there a setting somewhere I missed? It was annoying as I am drawn to read the subs even when its all english dialogue. Keep on turning subs on and off is a pita

I use the Netflix app on my Hisense smart tv if that helps,.

 

[Werewolf]

I think it depends on what the distributor has given netflix and what regions it's playing in.

It's easier in many ways to have all subs as optional files as it means you only need one set of video files, as opposed to potentially dozens if you need to have secondary subs hard coded.
Having the subs all controlled as overlays also tends to make them far more usable, for example Netflix's soft sub overlays are awesome in how versatile they are as you can chose the size, placement, colours and drop shadows that make it work for you, a lot of film hard coded subs are borderline unreadable on some scenes even if your eyesight is perfect, subs should be two colours, preferably contrasting so they show up regardless of if it's a very light, or very dark background (many film "burned in" subs are pretty close to white as they were effectively a cleaned area of the film and become nearly impossible to read on light background).

I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix may now start requiring "clean" video, of if the distributors have cottoned on to the need (it makes their life a bit easier as well).

And yeah, i've spent more time reading subs/getting annoyed by bad ones than most especially since my fathers eyes have started going and we're needing to use more than the tiny burned in subs that used to be the only option.

 

[Dewi15dewi]

I am 100% with you OP, just watching Kill Bill Volume 1 on Netflix, in which a large proportion of great dialogue is in Japanese, and there are no subtitles to enable you to understand them. In the original release in cinema and on dvd there were. If you ask me it takes a lot away from the movie and netflix should sort this issue out across all of their films. I, too, don't think it should be necessary to watch the film with subtitles for the English language parts. It's distracting. Obviously keep that option for deaf and hard of hearing people but they should always show the films how they were originally intended, in my opinion. Maybe just a good reason to keep dvds because these providers don't have the viewers best interests at heart.

 

[Haze]

+1 found this annoying, but have it on dvd also