David Farrier’s TV started telling him it hated him and it’s fascinating
David Farrier’s TV started telling him it hated him and it’s fascinating
Sometime last month, my TV started talking to me. And it's not good.
I'm going to throw my hat in the ring on guesses.
Somebody was debugging a hard to find problem in the Amazon video client. In an attempt to try to figure out what was causing it they had it print out a message using the subtitle system. They had been looking at it for many hours, not able to correlate a certain piece of media that trigger the error so the humorous chose I hate you as the flight to let them know it just happened.
And somehow that piece of Dev code made it to production.
Nah, seems to be an episode of The Boys with a mute character who uses sign language. So she signs i"I hate you" in a scene and it gets subtitled. But it doesn't use the normal CC code as it's a special case. And the code is buggy so it's really easy for the subtitle to not clear off the screen and since it isn't the normal subtitle/CC system it can't be controlled that way. Fun times!
I wouldn't worry unless it tells you to feed it a cat.
I have to return some videotapes
Feed me, Seymour.
So basically something in the sub in Amazons "the boys" triggering a bug in Samsungs sub engine?
Even if it is triggered by Amazon, surely it's more "Samsung's problem" and they're the ones you should be reaching out to?A TV show on one platform should be completely and unconditionally incapable of affecting any other content.I misread the bit of the article where it's only appearing on prime.
The article's author mentioned that the problem is not limited to Samsung TVs - someone reported the issue on their phone.
The article does not mention a root cause, but I have a theory that it's likely a malformed subtitle track. I tend to watch with subtitles on so I run into related issues every once in a while. Most of the time it's one of two things:
- The subtitles are misaligned (eg wrong offset, addressed by adding a positive or negative delay to the track)
- Bad formatting on the timing information.
The latter can have multiple effects depending on what format the subs are in, but most of the time it's a missing end time, meaning that the subtitle stays on. However, some formats also have cues as to who the speaker is, and that comes with a start and end tag like in HTML. I suspect that in this case the end tag is either missing or misaligned in the syntax tree, causing this one line of dialogue to be displayed over and over when the player reaches other lines matching the cue for it, but that don't get shown because the user has turned subtitles off.
As to why this is bleeding into other shows: I suspect it's an issue with how the software clients are caching the subtitle files. This would also explain why going back into the episode that caused this fixes things, because it would reset the cached file. Which in turn brings me back to pointing the finger at Amazon, not Samsung, because Samsung would just be loading Amazon's software client to play the video and subtitles.
It is only appearing on prime content tho?
I misread that.
Yeah. Not Samsung.
Have we tried turning the universe off and on again?