PGS and VOBSUB often have the same client limitation … it’s not natively supported on most client devices because it’s not an expected necessary function.
PGS\VOBSUB are found on physical discs… if the device doesn’t play discs no reason to add overhead or cost to software\hardware by including it.
ASS\SSA is almost exclusively found on grey market anime fansubs … why support it? Crunchyroll and Funimation use ASS\SSA support built into their app (or at least Crunchyroll does… or did) because it wasn’t expected to have native support.
SRT is used for closed captioning … it gets native support.
I wish there was an easy solution as well but as we keep running into… SSA\ASS fits in a weird market that doesn’t have much reason to support it (there’s a whole thing of anime fansubs having this hurdle forever as it’s kinda become part of the culture to move to these new formats before more widespread adoption - but that’s a different, but kinda interesting, conversation).
Edit: For reference, I transcode plenty of SSA on anime without any trouble on a decent but lower powered device (Synology DS218+) but my files are usually 720p or basic bitrate 1080p and I get a few seconds buffer and off it goes no problem. Higher resolutions or big bitrates? No way… PGS? No way. I work within my hardware basically.
Thanks for the explanation. But do you agree that SSA\ASS subs are usually better than the external SRT’s out there? At least that’s what I noticed with Attack on Titan. The ASS subs were way better than the external SRT’s downloaded by Bazarr.
Oh, absolutely SSA are definitely more functional and feature rich as a sub format compared to SRT.
They are HTML\Rich Text vs Plain Text. I mean, animated color changing karaoke for theme songs? C’mon.
It’s nice having signs and letters and phone texts overlaid with translations. It’s nice having multicolored texts to distinguish different speakers or formatted text to denote thoughts\announcements. It’s definitely a quality of life improvement when watching foreign language content. Unfortunately that also makes it cumbersome to support it as a thing that no industry is using as a standard except for grey market (being polite there) anime fansubs.
PGS on the other hand is used on Bluray and offers much of the same functionality (styling, colors, on-screen placement - even karaoke effects) and as a common standard on a popular medium is more likely to get client player support over SSA … but not as common as SRT because of that “if I don’t play discs why support a disc format” consideration. But backups of Bluray are a legit thing and that is more likely to get support without the “pirating flag” being tripped so maybe that’ll become more common going forward… but SSA will likely still be used by fansubbers (or some new thing) so might not be a solve there anyways.
I really wish we could get a matrix\table somewhere that just lays out the different player subtitle format support. It comes up a lot and there’s always conflicting information.
Anyways, like I mentioned… this gets into the whole cultural thing tied to the technology used by anime fansubbers over the years (I helped with VHS subbing back in the before time) so kinda touches on broader stuff but… yeah… it’d be nice if SSA was picked up over SRT as a more common and functional standard.
I see. Well, I could care less about the other “effects” on ASS/SSA subs. I was merely after the text and how they sync with the video. In my experience with AOT, the external subs downloaded by Bazaar weren’t very good in terms of syncing and the actual English translation itself. That’s why I decided to use the included ASS subs.
There are other sources for SRT as well… subscene.com is the one I use and there are tools to pull out the SSA text with timings and convert to UTF8 (SRT) … I haven’t done that myself but know it’s something folks do to make up for the SSA hurdles.
The only advantage SSA has over SRT is the formatting functions… nothing to do with the quality of the translations though fansub groups don’t often release SRTs so that’s why sometimes its hard to dig up good translations as SRT.
Yeah, subscene is one of the sources I use in Bazaar. I have everything automated in my system so manually converting is not an option for me (or at least not yet an option in Bazaar).
Oh well, the take away here is to avoid ASS/SSA’s as much as possible, lol.
SSA has another advantage: it can handle more than one subtitle appearing at the same time.
You can see that sometimes in anime when the theme song is still running and there is a kind of summary of previous episodes going on at the same time.
So you have independent lines of text at the top and the bottom of the screen.
If you try to convert such a file to SRT, you will often get unusable garbage that’s incompatible with most devices out there.
I was just lumping those layout functions in my “formatting” statement since I kinda extolled those SSA features earlier in the thread. SSA definitely has more QoL functions and it’s too bad it didn’t get picked up more mainstream particularly when you see movies like John Wick and Wanted and Night Watch use subtitles as interactive pieces of the movie.
I haven’t experienced anything with PGS subs - even on my blurays - is it equally comparable in functionality? My understanding was that it was pretty close…
That’s too bad… I was under the impression that’s what Disney was using for their karaoke Bluray releases with the bouncing ball and color changes so at least was somewhat comparable. I was hoping maybe PGS would pick up some of the gap lack of SSA support left… particularly since PGS is at least a more mainstream standard compared to SSA.
AFAIK, PGS does support rapidly changing content… So Karaoke effects are certainly possible. But if you 're ripping them, you can only play them on clients which support PGS natively.
There is no way to transfer these features into different formats. (except turning them into “hard subs” by burning them into the video picture during optimization)
Subtitle Edit for instance can read the old CDG files from karaoke CDs. But it cannot OCR them. Just convert them into PGS or burn them into a video file.
Subtitles are just a hurdle on streaming devices… often why I prefer to just burn them in when I encode (at least for forced subs).
I think this is where a lot of the subtitles questions with Plex could be avoided if we had a ‘client support matrix’ thing; but I realize that might be too much to maintain if it’s not already built into the client profiles.
Even if it’s something like:
Client ----------------- SRT ---- SSA ---- PGS
Apple TV X X
Roku X
Shield Pro X X X
Web X
Desktop (Win) X X X
I’m making up values for those because I’m not actually sure.
I know you jump in on a lot of these subtitle threads so I’m sure it’d free up a lot of your time as moderator to be able to just point at it.
