Google says SRV3 was causing playback errors, so it has "temporarily" disabled them.
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Google temporarily disabled YouTube’s advanced captions without warning
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If this messes up the release schedule of Shoyan Japanese Carpenter I'm going to riot.
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I watched a video about poisoning AI scrapers using carefully positioned SRV3 subtitles that were located and rendered to be invisible to a normal (human) viewer; maybe the disabling is related to that?
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So Google has graduated from deliberately killing useful feature sets for vaguely defined reasons to accidentally killing useful feature sets for vaguely defined reasons.
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This sort of crap always happens with accessibility features. Companies don't test with accessibility in mind, so updates break things and fixes are treated as low priority. After all, it's easy for someone with no disabilities to consider captions a nice-to-have feature instead of absolutely essential for understanding the content.
And sure, automatic captions exist, and they're better than nothing, but they're wildly inferior to human-made captions to the point of making some videos completely incomprehensible.
And sure, automatic captions exist, and they're better than nothing, but they're wildly inferior to human-made captions to the point of making some videos completely incomprehensible.
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average tech company behavior, paying the bare minimum lip service to accessibility features then tossing them aside when inconvenient.
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Heat. Heat. foreign
For those who are confused, these are what YouTube's auto-generated subtitles spit out during moments of silence or other non-vocal sounds. Yes, "Heat" is always capitalised and often followed by a full stop. Yes, "foreign" is always uncapitalised.
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I've blocked 6.87 million ads on Youtube.com, the more B.S. that the company throws at viewers the more it's gets blocked
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teaching_sand_to_think_was_a_mistake
Seniorius Lurkius
There are some good reasons that wouldn't make too much sense unless you've spent some time doing subtitle timing work.
SRV3 has some things that make soft-subbing with formatted text much more reasonable for videos that can have varying display resolutions. It's a YouTube problem, hence why a YT solution was necessary.
The real problem here isn't SRV3. They've disabled pretty much all add-on subtitle file capabilities that allow for formatting text. Like someone else mentioned, the impression is this is likely to combat AI poisoning since these soft-sub files would make it possible to include a lot of text no real user would see.
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Oh wow -- I had to google for that -- and apparently there's one's that is still up.
(or was un-delisted manually):
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ5yMg1l5Bg
Make sure to enable "CC" to see Bad Apple rendered in rapidly updating ASCII subtitles.
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Being a deaf person, I'm subject to various accessibility glitches.
The YouTube app on Amazon FireTV randomly turns off CC even though I try to have CC permanently turned on.
I don't know why it happens that CC is randomly turned off right after an advertisement break.
This accessibility bug in the YouTube app has been unfixed for the last 5 years, on all versions of Fire TV, all the way to the latest Xmas 2025 revision of FireTV 4K Pro (16GB version).
No other apps (that allows me to permanently set an English subtitle/CC feature) has this glitch, so I think it's a bug in the Amazon FireTV version YouTube app.
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It's so obvious how tech workers think about things when you don't live they way they expect you to: In a city with always-available high speed mobile data. For instance, the way that Google Maps offline mode likes to break in ways that are unfixable until the next time you get an internet connection, and that Apple Maps didn't even have an offline mode at all in 2022. Tech workers don't use their own products offline very often, so offline access is often an afterthought, if it is present at all.
Which to be clear is fine. I'm not paying for Google Maps after all. It's just notable.
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I read subtitles frequently and do not care for all these advanced formattings. Just plain, well thought out, translation with sensible timings. Also:
Automatic
Subtitles
Appearing
Word
By
Word
Is super annoying, why does yt waste resources making it that way?
Automatic
Subtitles
Appearing
Word
By
Word
Is super annoying, why does yt waste resources making it that way?
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People, you're voting up a newly created bot account that's posting AI SEO slop.
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well... they're implying/claim it was accidental. Given Google's track record , let's just say I'm suspicious.
Quite possible. Gemini seems to be Googles current pet "must succeed at all cost" project, so anything that might threaten their data scraping is going to be a target for "counter measures"
I'm sure your issue is far more annoying (since I can actually see) but I've been having the opposite issue with the official Youtube android app and website version (in Firefox) where it keeps turning ON CC even though I don't want/need them for English or Dutch.
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Google's captioning system has ALWAYS been a trojan horse to index the content of videos. They were perfectly fine maintaining an 'accessibility' feature that was beyond broken for years upon years with their gibberish 'auto-captioning'. Which was worse than actually doing nothing. Think of that Monty Python skit "My hovercraft is full of eels".... and their product was WORSE than that. Not a joke, a real product...
It has now finally improved to the level where it is actually useable, but now they do this...
I swear, there should probably be a lawsuit or something for this. You just don't rip out access to products... unless you don't give a shit about your customers.
It has now finally improved to the level where it is actually useable, but now they do this...
I swear, there should probably be a lawsuit or something for this. You just don't rip out access to products... unless you don't give a shit about your customers.
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That's a different one that's only using the basic subtitles. The fancy colored one is gone.
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Now "Music" gets put in the middle of text and "Thank you very much" often appears at the end. I suspect someone had the great idea of hooking the audio track up to an LLM instead of TTS.
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I will take nothing any day. CC should be off by default.
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The exact opposite. CC MUST be provided in order for some specific people being able to use the service. Which... was the point of the person you were replying to. You are clearly not disabled here, and don't comprehend that this is NOT something optional for some people. And... this is the exact same attitude which Google appears to have as well.
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Depending on how yu view it - if you wish to not assume malice, the ability to update, modify, and troubleshoot YTT as the website changes over the static SSA library.
If you wish to read malice, creator lock in. If you have to redo your subtitles to upload to to Rumble or Vimeo, it creates extra barriers designed to keep creators isolated to the YT platform.
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I realize you hypothetically may be sole downvoter of my mainly upvoted deaf post -- but the way it is /supposed/ to work is that it should be possible for the default CC setting to be be configurable by the end user (in a settings screen somewhere) to be permanently OFF or permanently ON.
But the problem is that it behaves quite inconsistently.
So you me and both complain (at opposite extremes)
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That's probably exactly what they did. Honestly, it's not as terrible an idea as it seems at first glance; it makes sense to me to use a transformer neural network to convert audio directly to text. They were originally developed for language translation, after all, and a token's a token. However, the pitfalls of training extensively on "content" found on YouTube can be clearly seen in these hallucinations (still have no idea about "Heat."; are there that many videos about furnaces on YT?)
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If this is indeed the case--then wouldn't it make far more sense to back out that breaking change until it can be fixed? Software regression issues happen all the time. The solution is a rollback.
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From what I've found, there was no "playback failure" to begin with EXCEPT on the official android app. Some videos exist with SRV3 subtitles still. They crash my android app and don't display subtitles at all. But it's not a device issue. I have an s25 Ultra. I open the exact same video in the Firefox app and it works 100% fine - no crashing, fancy subtitles. It works fine on my PC too. So my testing is showing me YouTube is punishing EVERYONE because their app sucks.
View: https://youtu.be/8Oos6D4_Bjo
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This seems hard to believe. Certainly it is easier to fix a bug in one app than it is to go through Youtube's entire catalog to remove a feature. Even if the fix is as dumb as disabling SRV3 on that app until a proper fix can be implemented.
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