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
>
While that’s true, it clearly worked and massive channels used it. So why is YouTube’s avoiding any responsibility and trying to kill it as quickly and silently as possible? Like, I get that sometimes you’ll have to drop support for things (even things you unofficially support), 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 a heads up for that or even help them out.
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. So it doesn’t even make sense to take that risk from what we know.
You can also use a power outlet with no grounding but don’t get surprised when your “buisness” burns down.
Except YouTube decided it’s going to light your “buisness” on fire because you aren’t using grounded outlets
While I’m not quite sure about the exact reasons for the removal, here are some probable guesses:
- it’s a bug
- the unsupported, internal format - that allows for pretty much everything - is in some way exploitable
- It’s getting replaced by something better/standardized as the current solution doesn’t seem to always work properly in YT’s apps
On the last point, it’s probably not for something better or standardized, It’s gonna be to push the AI captioning and dubbing.
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?
To encourage people to use the auto-generated ones and normalizing it.
I mean, I don’t see any other reason for them to remove a previously working format otherwise.
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. 🤷♂️
AI for you!
Oh this sucks hard, The Glorious Octagon is going to be ruined.
