ASS subtitles causing playback issues on TV

General Discussions
1

When playing ASS subtitles on iPhone the video plays with no issues. When playing exact same video on TV, video hangs up. If I turn off subtitles, video plays just fine on TV.

2

What’s your server? I know a lot of android video players have issues playing ASS subtitles, they end up having to burn them into the video stream. Which means an additional CPU load to burn the subs. And some devices may not be capable of transcoding a file AND subs at the same time.

In particular, I know the the Synology-line of NAS’s faceplant when you burn-in subtitles with HW transcoding.

3

Server is hosted on a Synology DS220+. Issue does seem to be consistent across android based devices. Thanks for the info.

4

Ah, good, then I have something for you. A long discussion in this forum post helped us come to a solution of sorts for HW transcoding and subtitles. It seems that for whatever reason, doing HW transcoding and then enabling subtitles causes the DS + series to faceplant. If you run in software transcoding and run subtitles, it’s capable of doing both (transcode + subtitle burn-in) at the same time, and the NAS can handle it, but uses up most of the CPU process. And certainly can’t do multiple transcodes at once.

What you can do, is tell the server to use a slightly older HW transcode driver. The Linux dev ChuckPa gave a solution:

I do have something you can try.

    Install the Synology Text Editor application
    Stop Plex
    Navigate into the Plex shared folder and down in until you see “Preferences.xml”
    Edit it (right-click, open in Text Editor)
    Cursor down to the closing /> on the very bottom line.
    Carefully add VaapiDriver="i965" in front of it.
    It will look like this when done:
    SomePref="Value" VaapiDriver="i965" />
    Save the file
    Start Plex

I’d say you can skip installing a text editor to those steps. You can download the preferences file locally, use a text editor to add the text, then drop it back onto the NAS folder and replace. The important bit is to put VaapiDriver=“i965” somewhere near the end of the preferences file, before the “/>” bit.

5

I made the modifications to the preference.xml file but sadly made no difference.

6

Rebooted the server after? Really didn’t help? That’s odd. For those that did it correctly, it seemed to perform miles ahead of how it did before, if you use HW accelerated transcoding on a video file with a subtitle…

7

Not sure what client you are using, but if you are able to install Kodi and then install the Plex for Kodi plug-in, you can use that to watch stuff with ASS subtitles. I’ve experienced this issue in the past (I use a SHIELD TV Pro, either 2015 or 2017 can’t remember) and just a few weeks ago something I think I read on this forum made me try that out.

Normally I’d have to have the subs burned in to be able to play, but using Plex for Kodi, I was able to direct stream what I had issues with when I tested. If you are able to do that, I think that would be your best bet because waiting for Plex to make any kind of change to be able to possibly handle ASS subs better (I think I remember someone posting on here that a newer version of the ExoPlayer might work, but not entirely sure) could take a very long time.

-Shark2k

8

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.