Subtitles

Of course we used subtitles. Closed captioning, whatever you want to call it. Yes, I know they are different, but technology has merged the two close enough. Words on the screen that showed what the people were saying is what I'm talking about here.

I don't know if Hillary used closed captioning in the age of VHS. I think it's pretty likely she didn't. Even when we first got together, she was far more self conscious about her hearing than she would be years into our relationship.

But by the time DVDs became the home media system of choice it was far less of an issue. DVDs had subtitle support and almost without exception had captioning.

But this leads us back a bit to another discussion about how we sourced our media. The first couple of times I did this, I assumed that everything would work. As any veteran of technology could tell you, it does not.

My earliest memory of working on this problem was in our office in the Clearview apartment. I had a video and I had a text file with what was theoretically the words spoken on screen. I had to smash the two together.

So I read specifications and tinkered with software and a few hours later emerged with a video that we could watch. I felt pretty good about that. It was also far too late to watch that movie that night. Hillary may have already gone to bed.

As time went on, I'd never mention that I had finished downloading some movie or show until I had previewed the videos at a few different timestamps and made sure the subtitles aligned. I spoiled myself on movies by accidentally jumping to important scenes as I skipped around making sure that the words weren't appearing seconds before or after they were spoken.

I wrote my own software to manually sync text with video when I hit a TV show that we were watching that had a half season run with very poorly synced subtitles. I became relatively good at guessing sub-second sync delays and matching things up more quickly.

By the time 2017 or so rolled around and I was only doing this a couple of times per year, I had it down to what would generally be a fifteen to twenty minute process in the (near) worst case. Much of that would be waiting for large files to be copied around and re-written.

I never really talked much about this aspect of what I did with regards to the movies and such with Hillary. I know she knew that I had to tinker with the subtitles sometimes and other times they didn't work and I got frustrated and then fixed them. I'm not entirely sure she ever knew just how much time I spent on the problem.

This makes me wonder now though, what sorts of things did Hillary do that I was only barely aware of? What things did she burn time on for my benefit? I have some ideas there, but mostly not related to actual chores.

Anyway, it doesn't matter much now. Hillary loved watching movies or tv and cuddling while we did that. She got hundreds of hours of this with well synced subtitles that largely worked before Netflix really arrived on the scene. That's a win. One point Warren.