I recently started using PlexDVR with generally good success. The only issue I haven’t been able to resolve are the display of closed captions. I know the video stream contains closed captions because I can play it via DLNA using VLC and enable them.
However, Plex shows “none” for subtitles and enabling closed captions via the “*” menu on my Roku clients doesn’t display anything. (note that captions on the Roku do work for other apps such as Amazon video or PBS, just not through Plex)
As a somewhat ugly workaround I can use an external utility like ccextractor to dump the closed captions to an external SRT file, which works as expected.
My question is: has anyone gotten this working using some combination of settings or a different client?
I had the same problem. What is confusing is that there actually is the CC option in the player but it doesn’t show any CC to select (shows ‘NONE’). The availability of the option seems to imply that the feature is available but the streamed video just doesn’t have CC.
Any plans adding this feature in the (near) future?
I recently purchased a HRHomerun.
I was having issues with CC being on and not being able to disable them on my Vizio TV running Plex MTK app.
Thought it was a HDHR problem and was on their message board. After several discussions determined that CC is
embedded and up the the software to determine what to do.
Software in this case is Plex. Even my Plex says none in the cc info. I still had them.
Discovered after several trial and errors playing with the options that if I set Plex to transcode
(by making the player run at a predetermined bandwidth (in my case 3meg-720p) the cc is on.
Only after running it in “Original” They will go away!
As far as Plex doing CC I do it all the time with downloaded shows.
I think MovieFan.Plex meant not avail with LIVE tv.
First just to make sure people understand Closed Captions and Subtitles are not the same thing. Plex handles subtitles but not CC for display purposes.
The CC information is recorded with Plex DVR and you can see this if you play the file in VLC. With that said you can extract the CC info and convert it to an SRT subtitle which Plex can recognize and use. You can do this in the post-processing stage if you wanted.
I post-process my recordings including the cutting of commercials and conversion to MP4 format with AAC audio (scripts in my thread in SIG). The scripts also pull the CC info after cutting the commercials and I end up with SRT versions of them which then play fine through Plex.
If you want a more simplistic way of creating these SRT file that can be used you can use ffmpeg to do so with a command similar to:
ffmpeg -f lavfi -i movie=“FileName.ts[out0+subcc]” -map s “FileName.srt”
You could easily set this up in Plex Post processing or add it to any additional processing you do (or use the scripts I provide which do this plus convert to MP4 and give you direct playable files.
Hope that helps,
Carlo
EDIT: that ffmpeg command about shroud work but the screen will be verbose and will take longer to run. In production change the verboseness of ffmpeg and maybe redirect the output to make it run faster.
The problem for me was that just extracting to SRT didn’t seem to work because Plex expects post-processing to leave a single file in the output directory, which wasn’t entirely obvious.
ryanfb, trying to implement your post processing script and having some issues. I removed the commerical skip portion, and left the rest after I installed ffmpeg and ccextrator. I’m getting an error when it attempts to run the script. Logs show the below when it attempts to run. Any suggestions?
@jmcwheeler said:
ryanfb, trying to implement your post processing script and having some issues. I removed the commerical skip portion, and left the rest after I installed ffmpeg and ccextrator. I’m getting an error when it attempts to run the script. Logs show the below when it attempts to run. Any suggestions?
Googling 0xc1 (and now quoting this and seeing the script path) this looks like it’s probably a Windows error, so if you’re running your Plex server on Windows I’m not sure exactly what you’d need to do to get it to run a Bash script. Probably what I would do is make it a .bat script instead, but I haven’t used batch scripting in so long I don’t know how to convert my script to that format. Alternately you could try the new Bash on Windows 10 beta: Install WSL | Microsoft Learn
I’m noticing the same issue with a a show I record on my Prime. NBC Nightly News always shows the CC, but I can’t turn it off. I find zero settings in my Prime and zero settings on the Plex DVR.
I can recreate the issue, and no matter what quality I stream at, the CC shows up
@jmcwheeler said:
Any word on when CC will be available in Plex DVR? My partner is deaf and this is the only thing holding me back from going all in on this.
My wife is hard-of-hearing, and no CC is a deal-breaker for us, as I look at Windows Media Center replacements.
@jmcwheeler said:
Any word on when CC will be available in Plex DVR? My partner is deaf and this is the only thing holding me back from going all in on this.
My wife is hard-of-hearing, and no CC is a deal-breaker for us, as I look at Windows Media Center replacements.
This is so close, but so far… I came from NPVR which is great and records subtitles (UK DVB-T) perfectly and Plex even plays then great, so perhaps that is somewhere you can look?
I hope Plex catches up soon because the interface is great, but while not cool, CC is really important to an important minority of people
Hello all. We are looking to provide better support of closed captioning. Just to provide some background, closed captioning and subtitles are not the same thing. Closed captions are enbedded in the video stream transmitted by broadcasters. The closed caption info needs to be able to separated out from the video stream. Subtitles are separate from the video stream so nothing needs to be separated. This separation is up to the video player. Currently, the only video player Plex uses that support separating out the closed caption info is Plex Media Player. However, this only works if the video is in the .ts container. However, there were other video playback issues when using .ts with the DVR feature so it was changed to use .mkv, which resulted in the CC playback no longer working. We are looking for solutions to get the CC info back.
I may be missing something but I was mixing to MKV all along, with working captions on Apple TV and - until recently on IOS until it was separately broken during a recent app update.
The post above doesn’t sound very positive, given the reference to “looking for solutions”. What are the odds that this essential feature will be returned to those of us who are dependent on it?
