Well, here’s an interesting tidbit I just found out. It certainly looks like frame-accurate subtitles are not actually possible in either the SUP or BDN+XML formats (the two graphical formats). This is because for some reason, the internal timings are stored at a fixed 24.000fps, in a weird hybrid seconds+frames format, and are converted to 23.976fps values on the fly. This is usually not a problem but every now and then, something just won’t come out on the exact right frame. Which means we can add frame accuracy to the reasons to burn the theatrical alien subtitles in.
Not that frame accuracy matters at all for your typical subtitles, so maybe this issue never concerned the people writing the specs. But still, I feel like this is crappy because it’s a self-inflicted technical limitation that they could have pretty easily avoided. In fact, the way timing is handled seems so needlessly complicated, I don’t even…