We just started using Plex as our DVR, with HD Homerun as our tuner and Fire TV Stick 4K. We have been able to get the subtitles to play automatically, so that is good. However, I would really like to be able to make the subtitle background transparent, or possibly even gone (if we can also have a black outline on the letters themselves). I have been able to do that type of thing on most services I have used, and I feel like I am missing a pretty big portion of the screen because of the black background, which is sometimes much bigger than the words in the subtitles. Is there a way to do this? Thanks!
Can you provide a screenshot? AFAIK, the background for subtitles is transparent and there is a black outline around the text. You can adjust the size of the subtitles, but that’s the only option currently available. We hope to add more options in the future.
Please see attached.
Those are closed captions. Not exactly the same as subtitles. The formats of these can’t be changed.
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OK…what are subtitles, then, and would they work better for me?
The terminology of subtitle is not consistent so let me explain differently. What you are seeing is text information embedded into the video stream. In the US, these are called closed captions, but other regions may use subtitle. This is what is used for live tv. The video player extracts this information in real time to display it. Think of it as receiving the info 1 letter at a time. We can’t know how much text there may be so it can’t be formatted ahead of time. An alternative to this is storing the information outside of the video. This can be a separate track in the file or an external file. The information can be encoded as graphic, what is used on dvd and blurays, or as actual text, often found with online videos. If its the text type, the video player can read this file and format the text since it has all the info already. If it isvideo, it gets displayed over the actual video but since it’s graphic infi, it also cannot be formatted.
So if you want text that can be formatted, you’ll need to manually find textual subtitles for your videos. Plex has recently added a new feature for Plex Pass members to assist with this. On supported plex clients, when selecting to use subtitles or not, there is an option to search for these textual subtitles.
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