Submitted 1 day ago by missphant@lemmy.blahaj.zone to technology@lemmy.world
https://piunikaweb.com/2026/01/18/youtube-srv3-subtitles-disabled-custom-captions-removed/
These offer customization like colors, text styling and positioning and are used to distinguish who is speaking or for karaoke subs and are now potentially being lost forever.
> Use UNSUPPORTED subtitle format instead of one of the other 10 supported ones
> Fast forward some time
> YT disables and removes the UNSUPPORTED format
> Image
While that’s true, why is YouTube’s response to kill it as quickly and silently as possible? Like, I get that sometimes you’ll have to drop support for things, but there should be a phase out period during which people can either backup and re-upload videos with those captions to preserve them. They could and should honestly provide support for that.
Now they are literally decimating people’s hard work and on top of that pissing off actual partners. Not saying it will be successful, but cutting into people’s business like that is the kind of thing you can get sued over.
You can also use a power outlet with no grounding but don’t get surprised when your “buisness” burns down.
More like unofficially supported. The fact that they worked points to the fact that they were quite literally supported.
Unsupported typically just means they wont provide (technical) support if/when it breaks.
Generally unsupported means “we will not support this, you’re on your own”
Rather than “this will not work at all, we have ensured that”
YT is throwing out the baby with the bathwater
Those styling option sure sound like something SSA subs could do…Wonder why that wasnt used.
Didn’t crunchyroll recently do something similar?
Wtf is going on, what do companies have against fancy subtitles
Crunchyroll subtitles are absolute dogshit now. I am mad enough to cancel my account. Fucking sad that pirating will get me a better product than the one I was paying for.
Always did, especially so with anime
In the past my mom pirated anime while still paying for Funimation, because they had a quality service that got simuldubs and had a lot of content. Then CR bought them oit and now were stuck with this “pay for the highest tier to get all the content and no ads” and “oh it’s only on our platform until March!” and “Oops we didn’t even port over all the shows on Funimation, sorry lol!” and “Oh, like the AI generated subtitles?”
We will not be giving CR a single fucking penny. I’m close to finishing my home/media server and we’ll just watch that way or with Kodi.
MMW YouTube will push AI fancy subtitles.
AI for you!
Because God forbid using anything other than their own generated subs. Or to have options.
If that's a push to their AI systems, while AI has its uses, when coincidences or fuck ups are too consistent, it may not be either anymore. And thus it feels like Google is trying to tarnish AI to the point even supporters move away from it.
While I’m not quite sure about the exact reasons for the removal, here are some probable guesses:
On the last point, it’s probably not for something better or standardized, It’s gonna be to push the AI captioning and dubbing.
I’m sure auto-generated captions will work great for channels like Primitive Technology where there’s no actual talking and the subtitles are describing what he’s doing…
What have auto-generated/AI caption contents to do with the general format captions???
YT has auto-generated captions now for years, so why would they remove an unsupported, internal format because of that?
the unsupported, internal format - that allows for pretty much everything - is in some way exploitable
It prevents AI summaries of the video from including all the video content. Obvious solution: remove the information missing from the summary from the video itself. Now they match! /s
I have random issues with youtube subtitles in general. I often watch foreign language videos, occasionally for learning. Except sometimes whilst they work in the video’s language, the translations don’t…until I reload the page, or quit the browser. Or on specific computers which never have issues. 🤷♂️
Oh this sucks hard, The Glorious Octagon is going to be ruined.
termaxima@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
Dammit, it was very useful to poison subtitle files for AI !
Write immense amounts of garbage text outside the viewport. AI sees it, viewers don’t ! I believe there’s even a way to prevent screen readers from getting confused by it… It was great.
FaceDeer@fedia.io 1 day ago
"Why did they take that feature away? I was busy abusing it!"
umbrella@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
you are right but to be fair fuck ai.
kittenzrulz123@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
This shouldn’t be a problem because YouTube shouldn’t have AI, it shouldn’t have shorts, it should just be a place to watch normal videos made by real people ideally with an algorithm that promotes quality content
luridness@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
F4mi’s video on that topic was so very interesting :( plus ass is just the best subtitle format