alt.hn

2/13/2026 at 3:48:43 PM

Netflix Measures Dialogue Intelligibility

 https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/measuring-dialogue-intelligibility-for-netflix-content-58c13d2a6f6e

by marbex7

2/13/2026 at 5:24:50 PM

Maybe I'm stupid, but why is this tech needed now? Whenever I watch movies (new to me) if they're from before ~2005 I never need subtitles to understand, never mind genre or origin... and if they're more recent I frequently do. It's cool to have tools that highlight this for folks in industry, but how were they getting it right before that?

by kixiQu

2/13/2026 at 5:47:34 PM

I think the complexity of audio has out stripped quality of speaker systems.

My guest room has a cheap 40inch TV the audio is terrible compared to the visual output. And I can play what feels like cinema quality 7.1 audio and 4K video over it. The result is the audio is terrible, tiny distorted. Muddy. Hard to understand if it's anything other than a voice over.

In 2005 the quality of whatever I was watching was crap but it was mixed knowing that it was likely going to be viewed that way!

That's been my conclusion admittedly based on not much.

by rustyhancock

2/13/2026 at 7:39:39 PM

I think a big key is channel management. You wouldn't buy significantly cheaper smaller audience content because it had to be big enough audience for the time it was blocking.

by yakikka

2/13/2026 at 6:43:13 PM

I think this is mostly down to the "realism" that is created in a lot of movies... not to mention the music, background noises, etc.

Older TV shows (and many movies) were done more as closed set stage shows... often more emphasis on understanding what is said was made than making sure the feel/drama was best expressed.

I find myself turning on captions a lot these days... it definitely detracts from the viewing experience, but not as much as having to crank the volume to crazy levels.

by tracker1

2/13/2026 at 5:13:13 PM

Nice graph and all, but reality shows that on stereo speakers their sound mix is thumping effects and subtitle requiring dialog.

Unless this is something they just wrapped up right now and going forward we'll have better mixes for common media playback devices. Most people use stereo thinny speakers on old laptopts, and subpar phones.

by mhitza

2/13/2026 at 6:48:03 PM

Even on my 5.2 setup it's still not great for a lot of content that's coming down in stereo... the center channel is supposed to focus on the dialog, but often the mixdown/up being served doesn't do a good job of it. A large part of it imo is the mixing done for movies which are generally in very loud, controlled environments vs. say classic TV which was closed set stage performances... we're directing more for subtle nuance in acting today over being able to clearly hear what's going on.

I think we can overcome this with better listening and playback options though... personally, I just turn on captions/subs where available.

by tracker1

2/13/2026 at 4:34:42 PM

Looks nice but sadly it is just a blog post without Open Source or shared tool that we could use to test.

by greatgib