I would like see to a feature that can transcode/convert my subtitle files from PGS/VOB/ASS to SRT whilst playing a video just like when a audio has to be transcoded.
Why?
because i simply want direct play. When i use any other subtitle file other than SRT my video and audio decides to transcode resulting in lower quality and most importantly BUFFERING.
Before anyone says use the automatic subtitle downloader that can get SRT subs that’s NOT a solution because either you have to find the correct one that’s in SYNC with the video or you can’t find one at all ESPECIALLY with the TV episodes.
This will also save all the headache of telling my friends not to use subtitles because of a certain sub format that will make their playback to buffer.
The conversion of a pixel-based subtitle format (PGS/VOB) into a text-based format (SRT) requires optical character recognition (OCR).
This process is fraught with errors and cannot be done fully-automatically. (unless you want parts of the converted subtitles to be faulty)
As Otto said, this can be done, but is a very buggy process. I, myself, manually convert them to SRT using free software, and it is a very time consuming process to fix all the errors, even with very robust OCR.
So, doing it on the fly would generate subs, but would probably be pretty awful.
I have a hard time believing OCR can be that bad in 2021. The Apple Newton could interpret handwritten texts in 1993. YouTube can even interpret voice and create subs from that? But Plex can not interpret typed letters using OCR in a decent way? In 2021? I refuse to believe that.
Check it out… there’s various apps offering OCR features (I know of Subler on Mac using Google Tesseract). Results aren’t that convincing. I’ve spent more time spell-checking the resulting subtitles than it takes to create them (therefore I’m super glad my environment deals well with the original PGS/Vobsub subtitles)
