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Author Topic: Alternate movie subtitles for commentary, trivia, etc?  (Read 4129 times)

JavaJones

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Alternate movie subtitles for commentary, trivia, etc?
« on: January 08, 2011, 09:44 PM »
Does anyone know of any sources of "alternate" subtitle tracks with e.g. movie trivia or other commentary?

The back story: I was sitting here watching LA Story and came to a part where someone is very obviously doing a voice for the mother of the lead actress on the phone, and I wondered who was doing that voice. The thought occurred it might even be Steve Martin, and very probably was at least one of the other actors in the film. Then I thought of the old VH1 show Pop Up Video, which I used to love, how it would probably answer my question if they had pop-up video for movies, and then I realized how cool it would be to have a subtitle track of trivia or even normal "director's commentary" (as opposed to an alternate audio track). So I wondered, does anything like this exist?

I've seen Rifftrax before:
http://www.rifftrax.com/
Which is cool and fun, but for one it's all just jokes, not trivia or serious commentary, and it's also a replacement audio track rather than subtitles.

There's something appealing to me about being able to actually watch the original movie with normal audio, but also see and read the commentary if I want to. And this makes me also wonder if they ever have text versions of director's commentary or other alternate commentary/audio tracks on movies.

Going further with this, it seems reasonable that such a thing could/should/or already would have spawned a community of people making such subtitle tracks. One wonders if they could be somehow "crowd sourced" like IMDB trivia for example. Essentially, think of converting IMDB trivia into contextual, timed subtitles and you have a simple idea of how it might work and the potential appeal. I suppose just assigning a "time code" to a piece of trivia could lead to being able to auto-generate a subtitle track from multiple people's submissions for example.

So has anyone seen or heard of anything like this?

- Oshyan

MilesAhead

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Re: Alternate movie subtitles for commentary, trivia, etc?
« Reply #1 on: January 09, 2011, 01:17 AM »
You might check into players that automatically search for subtitles matching the movie you are playing.  Some may try to get closed caption/commentary esp. if your subtitle preferred language is the same as the audio.

I don't go in for commentary tracks.. just English subs for foreign audio.
Some of the players have configuration what sites to search for subs. That may give you a starting point.

Mostly I look for English subs for Asian films so I'm not up on which sites have databases for commentary tracks.

JavaJones

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Re: Alternate movie subtitles for commentary, trivia, etc?
« Reply #2 on: January 09, 2011, 01:25 AM »
Yeah, I'm familiar with those kinds of players and sub sites. Admittedly I haven't checked any of them for this kind of "commentary subs", so good idea there. I'll take a look.

Thanks. :)

- Oshyan