Amph Subtitles in your native language: on or off?

I usually have them on. They keep me from cranking up the volume too high, and help if the dialogue is difficult to understand. However, if the station I'm watching provides absolutely awful titles (out of synch with the action, heavily inaccurate), I'll switch them off.

 

I haven't put Closed Caption/subtitles on with Prime, but I got that the other day with YouTube when they put Dutch Closed Captioning on an US Video.

 

Not sure if this is connected in any way or not, but I also know people who use headphones for games, but do not with movies or television. That one is also kind of baffling to me.

 

Audio cues can be really important in games. For like pretty much any shooter it's important to hear, for example, enemy footsteps and from what direction they're coming from.

 

Oh, that makes total sense. We may have just discovered why I'm bad at games.

 

Always on for movies and TV shows played via streaming or Blu-ray/DVD.

For broadcast/cable TV, usually off by default, but if I find it difficult to hear dialogue without cranking the volume up so loud that the commercials blow my eardrums out, then I turn the closed captioning on and leave it on. Sometimes if I know I'm watching something that is likely to have quiet scenes without sufficient baked-in subtitles (Survivor was a notorious example of this when I used to watch it), I'll turn the closed captioning on by default.

However, I never, ever turn closed captioning on for anything that is broadcast live, because the captions in that case lag behind the audio by several seconds and are often inaccurate and/or full of typos, and it ends up being more distracting than helpful.

As to the question of why, I like subtitles/closed captions because I'm easily distracted. Often times, a piece of dialogue causes my mind to wander, and when my mind wanders, I essentially become deaf briefly. But I can still follow the action with my eyes, and so captions ensure that I don't miss anything important and help me stay focused and snap back to reality more quickly. Also, I have slight hearing problems, in that when multiple sounds are competing for my attention (which can be dialogue, music, someone talking in the hallway outside my apartment, the bag of potato chips I'm munching on, etc.), I'm unable to single out one to focus on. So when the dialogue blends in with other sounds, captions ensure that I can still follow along and not miss anything.

 

I have them on. My hearing isn't as amazing as it once was, and throw in ambient sound, and I'm stuffed without them.

 

I'll add that I'll switch them off if the subtitles diverge too much from the actual dialog, like the 3rd season of Star Wars Rebels.

 

So for those of you who do subtitles I must ask... What do you do when you see movies in theatres? Have any of you ever used the descriptive devices?

 

Nah, I just watch it as normal. Subtitles for me are just a preference. They're not absolutely mandatory.

 

I don't normally, but if I ever do a rewatch of Tenet, I'm going to have to use subtitles.

 

Only for foreign languages. Including foreign-language dubs of English-speaking shows, which brings an entirely new level of hilarity when they don't match up. But I find them distracting in either case. I'd prefer to just watch, or just listen.

 

Even with subtitles on for Tenet they didn't do a whole lot to make the movie better.

 

I do watch a lot of foreign films, and I'll watch them subtitled in the original language. Something like 2018's Cold War would come off as a farce if it was dubbed.

 

I notice the lack on a rare trip to the flicks, but the volume tends to compensate well. Have spotted some are audio description but haven't tried it and it could be some time before I ever do now.

For the most part, I tend to wait for the BR. Or now, in select cases, UHD.

 

Haven't consumed many things with subtitles in my native language for a while, but I do tend to turn on English subtitles on Netflix etc. Not sure why, I don't actually need them. But it is a) habit, b) TV doesn't need to be very lound, c) with sci-fi & fantasy shows I want to know how to spell names.

 

I useď to use subtitles all the time, but my vision is now pretty terrible, so they're useless now.