The idea is to be able to play 4k movies with EXTERNAL subtitles, something which is impossible to do on-the-fly right now without noticeable quality degradation.
I don’t care if there can be only ONE trancoded movie at any given time, so as to not contaminate the library with duplicate movies.
I am aware that this means simply wrapping ffmpeg with plex GUI, but it still much easier than running ffmpeg by ones self.
AFAIK, this is solely a matter of picking the right playback device and subtitle format. Many players don’t support the original subtitle format of Blurays and DVDs. Therefore you must convert them into SRT to achieve direct-playability.
A nVidia Shield should be able to play at least SRT subtitles without requesting transcoding from the server.
Have you tried the ‘Optimize’ feature of Plex?
In my scenario I have a 4K movie and external SRT subtitle, and nVidia Shield. The movie plays great without subtitles. But when I select the external one, I get a notice that my server is not strong enough or something to that effect.
Can ‘Optimize’ create a 4K movie? The best I am offered on my server is 1080P.
If I burn the subtitle in with ffmpeg - all is fine.
Then you probably also did either select not the first audio track in the file, or the audio needs to get transcoded to be compatible with the Shield. Some players request a transcode in this situation, because otherwise video and audio can drift apart over time.
But I assume yes, it is probably time to extend the optimization target profiles to include 4K.
2021 clean-up: duplicate
