Subtitling pit-falls

Problems you might encounter with some fansubs:

• Text size can be too small. Not all people have perfect vision and/or are located very close to the screen. Some people have poor screens. If the subtitles are encoded as a part of the image, the user will not even be able to change this in his software configuration.
• Some weird font was chosen for the subtitles to "fit the style of the movie". This is usually not a good idea, as subtitles are supposed to be as easy to read as possible, and not take time to deal with mentally, or take away focus from the movie itself.
• Subtitles are partially hidden behind the plastic frame of the TV. This is because fansubbers are often not aware of the safe area that many TVs have. This applies mostly to CRT televisions but even some flatpanel TVs crop off a bit of the edge.
• Audio is going out of sync. This is usually because people think they can safely use variable bitrate audio (VBR) in the .avi container. But this will not work for everyone, and should be avoided. Other containers such as the .mkv or .mp4 container supports VBR audio perfectly.
• You're entirely unable to play the video file. People who encode movies sometimes get carried away with the ongoing and fascinating development of new video and audio formats. Choosing a very new (and typically poorly tested/supported) format might save a bit of diskspace, but will often leave normal people unable to make things work at all - especially on hardware playback devices that cannot be easily updated. Fansubbers should be somewhat conservative when choosing codecs and container formats.