Issue: low powered NAS devices can’t transcode, thus are unable to burn subtitle into the video stream.
State: AFAIK, currently most Plex clients rely on PMS to just do that - burn in the subtitle, if selected previously.
Request: Allow to transcode all available subtitle files (SRT?) and add them to “direct stream” media. That way, some kind of client player could just pick up video, audio and subtitle and natively allow for selection and display (yes, looking at you, AppleTV…). And the NAS doesn’t have to do the heavy work transcoding the video.
Yes. This is exactly what should be prioritized instead of Media Optimization. It’s stupid to have this feature which doesn’t fix the problem in the first place.
Video that needs subtitles results in 100% cpu and chokes every time. The point of optimization is to prevent this, but it doesn’t address subtitles in the least. To put it simply, I can pay for better internet, but I can’t modify PMS to simply convert subs and mux into the stream.
The only true solution to the problem is to make sure all the player apps can overlay subs even those that are external to the video…
If you are having a hard time with transcoding now to get subs the way they are done then there really is no solution I can think of that would solve that.
The issue isn’t incompatible subs the issue is the CPU isn’t good enough to transcode much of anything.
Early 2021 clean-up:
- many current generation clients support direct playback of image based subtitles (e.g. iOS, Apple TV, some Android clients w/ new player)
- on-demand subtitle search (loading SRT subtitles)
