YouTube has reportedly begun deleting custom user-submitted subtitles for videos, and many of them aren’t happy about it.
With YouTube having such a global reach, plenty of creators have used subtitles and dubbing to make their videos easier to watch in different countries. This has seen some launching wholly separate channels just for the subtitles and language dubs.
YouTube does generate subtitles on videos in a number of languages, but it can get a little funky with mistranslations and not being able to keep up with the speed of a video. This has seen numerous creators use custom subtitles.
Not only do these custom subtitles allow for better translations, but they’ve also been used to jazz up music videos for the likes of Hololive and other VTubers. However, it appears the platform has started removing them.
YouTube is deleting custom subtitles
“YouTube is SLOWLY DELETING all custom subtitles. My proudest creation and even huge companies/creators are having their subtitles totally gone, including Hololive,” X user MayMei, a translation manager for MonochroMenace posted.
“@YouTube Please revert this, as more and more subtitles get removed, more people will speak up.”
The X user also referred to a post from Hololive’s Hinson, who posted about them losing subtitles on a music video. “We just spotted the first hololive video that lost its subtitles too – an MV with 11M views. This confirms that the broken SRV3 upload is not a bug. It’s part of a planned and unannounced crackdown,” they posted.
Hinson noted that “SRV3 isn’t officially documented and thus pretty obscure,” and that Hololive is the “most well-known example” of people who use it, alongside Tom Scott.
“It would be a true shame to permanently lose access to this format,” he added. “Sure, it’s not officially supported or even documented, and no doubt, we were never meant to use it in the first place. And sure, subtitle authors could switch to a supported format… But it just wouldn’t be the same.”
It remains to be seen if YouTube will revert the change of the clampdown will only widen.
