Hi all, this topic has been brought up in various locations on the forums, but they all are old and either say it’s resolved or…
I have a Tablo DVR that I extract recordings from. Those recordings come with Closed Captioning. I then run those files through Handbrake where the Closed Caption gets converted to an embedded ASS file (I guess, still new to this).
When I then play that file WITH subtitles on both Plex Web (Edge and Chrome) and nVidia Shield Plex client; Plex wants to transcode and ultimately the video does not play. It lags and buffers and the message says, “too slow to stream” even though everything is on Ethernet AND when it does transcode, it transcodes fine. Just not whenever it’s doing what it’s doing with these subtitles.
What does play correctly, though, is the Plex for Windows client. So this is something that can work… it’s just broken on these other clients.
It’s not actually a bug.
It’s the inability of the player device to deal with ASS subtitles.
My Roku, for instance, has to ‘Remux’ the streams into HLS, but then will stream the ASS subs without a full blown transcode - as long as ‘Image Formats Only’ is the selection in the client. I can deal with a ‘Remux’. I couldn’t deal with a full blown transcode. I’m lucky.
It’s wild how I can play the video fine but the moment I select subtitles it forces the quality to Convert. It’s just a bug… this should easily be fixed. Stop forcing conversion when selecting ASS… simple.
If you’re seeing this behavior in Plexweb - that’s just the way it is.
Plexweb runs in your browser and Direct Playback of just about anything is compromised - in your browser.
Your browser has limited support for such things.
ALL my other client devices deal with ASS - as long as the selection is ticked in the client app. BTW - that’s where you’d set the selection - not in the server. That’s ONLY for Plexweb (and apparently it didn’t help, right?).
Hunt down that setting - if available - in the Android TV Plex App.
Direct Play of SSA/ASS isn’t supported by Android (current exoplayer limitation). You have to transcode. Now why your transcodes sometimes fail is a separate issue.
Out of the nowhere Plex started to transcode with ASS subtitles again for no reason. By now I think Plex will never be able to support subtitles properly. They can’t even manage to handle text based subtitles.
You mean my client could deal with ASS subtitles and now it can’t? And you mean Plex implemented on the fly conversion of ASS subtitles into something your client supports and it was working and now it is not and my client is the guilty one? Sorry, but I do not buy it.
If it was working before and now it is not working I seriously doubt my client is to blame.
