Just some observations from an interested reader:
The slightly dimmer white and increased transparency of the new subtitles look great to me.
However, I’m not as keen on the narrower font. It looks somewhat squashed to me.Bluto
Just to update you on the progress on this: This may be addressed in the final version after all. After repeating the size testing, it looks like the increased weight at the same height makes the subtitles look too big even in my crappy small screen/big distance worst-case test scenario. So, keeping the weight the same, you don’t have to reduce the font size very much before the “lines get too wide” problem goes away, and then you don’t need a semicondensed font to work around that anymore.
Small adjustments make a big difference here. Consider the subtitles a long skinny rectangle near the bottom of the screen. If you reduce the font size, say, 10%, that doesn’t change the height of the box very much in absolute terms, but it dramatically reduces the width of the box. That’s kinda what I’m tinkering with here.