Almost my entire plex library is fansub anime. Since the death of deadfish (a fansub group who released their videos with baked in subtitles) I have been forced to have plex transcode everything because good anime subs are done with softsubs so that things like overlays and effects can be used. Unfortunately a new hurdle is creeping up and that is more and more shows are using h265 which demands even more from my server’s cpu and it is just barley able to do it realtime.
I think if the subtitle engine was designed to relay softsubs properly we could avoid having to transcode altogether. There is a lot of needless transcoding going on just because the subtitle playback method is falling short.
All of which is controlled by plex. Indeed though it is because plex does not support the more advanced subtitle formats. They are not regularly used when it comes to dvd/blueray ripped subs, but heavily used in anime fansubs (as well as user created subtitles for other genres).
Except it’s not controlled by Plex… if the client doesn’t support ASS format Plex has to burn them in. Plex isn’t rendering anything… it just streams or transcodes then streams depending on client support
But the default “Automatic” option under subtitle burning can transcode text based subtitles even though it’s not needed. And if you change the option to “Only image formats”, all image based subtitles will be burned in.
It is time for a fourth option besides the regular 3. Something like “Avoid subtitle burning at all costs” would spare our servers.
You can try yourself with ASS subtitles on the Android client. It plays fine with “Only image based subtitles” but gets burned in at “Automatic”
You’d have to ask Amazon, Roku, various tv manufacturers, etc… they control what is available which is why every platform has a slightly or completely different UI/Player.
What I mean is why is plex able to incorporate hardware base subtitles with plain jane subtitle formats, but not SSA. This should be answerable by a plex dev, although I’m not actually expecting an answer back from them. Its more like they have a subtitle system in place that works via hardware overlay… and if plain subtitle and image formats can be converted to work on it, why not SSA?
Likely because it requires a parser and lots of external things like fonts… SSA/ASS is more of a scripting language while SRT is plain text and PGS/SUB are images.
I see. being a scripting language would explain a lot of the fancy effects, I always thought it was simply refreshing/rewriting a lot of subtitle lines at once. My plea is still there but atleast now I know things are a little more complicated than just supporting another subtitle format.
