Feature wanted: update to subtitle management on Fire TV

Feature Suggestions
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Dear all,

over the course of the last year, great improvement has been done on several clients implementing the new Exoplayer v2. It comes with expanded subtitle support.

But regular usage is still very hard on the FireTV, because the FireTV app has “modes” to handle the subtitles of any movie. This once was a good thing, but with the new Exoplayer, things have changed and it is time to update the “subtitle management engine”.

You can find details of that in the following thread:

… of which I am citing the known facts.

FireTV can handle ASS subtitles, FireTV can handle PGS / VOBSUB subtitles, FireTV can handle SRT sidecar subtitles… BUT:

ASS subtitles are working on the FireTV if the mode is set to “images only”, but not in the mode “auto”.
SRT, PGS or VOBSUB subtitles work on the FireTV if the mode is set to “auto”, but not in the mode “images only”.

As a user of the client, you don’t have any idea, what kind of subtitle a movie has until you want to activate that subtitle. The Plex software does nothing to intelligently switch between the modes that are known to work in either mode. So, if the wrong mode is set, the Plex server starts to (unnecessarily) transcode the movie (which might not even work if the movie is HEVC, for example).

So, the user has to stop the movie, go to the main menu of the Plex FireTV app, go to settings from there, change the subtitle setting of the FireTV app, find the movie again, switch on the subtitle. Oh, and of course, you must KNOW about this to make it work at all.

Wanted feature: Automation of the Plex FireTV subtitle handling to better support the excellent subtitle support of the Exoplayer v2.

I really hope that I don’t need further reasoning in order to initiate this. It is a shame how people with hearing disabilities are treated since years by Plex… I hope that @elan takes this as an opportunity to step in to set this as one of the priorities of the team. Some progress has been made already, but Plex is not using the Exoplayer possibilities to the maximum right because of its own surrounding software.

PLEASE HELP.
Thank you.

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Hey,

Thanks for your post.

The “modes” you are referring too are the user setting to how to handle subtitles (titled “Burn subtitles”), which include:

  • Automatic
  • Only image formats
  • Always

When the application is initially installed, the user default is set to “Automatic”.

As for ASS, technically we do not support it unfortunately. ASS is an incredibly complex and powerful subtitle format, allowing for really rich subtitles that can do seriously crazy effects (masks, rotations, etc). What our app can do, is basically strip everything away from an ASS subtitle to simply grab the raw text. It then applies zero of the formatting from the subtitle and renders it as just plain text.

This is the reason that we kept “Automatic” to not include ASS rendering. If users are utilising ASS subtitles, it feels bad (wrong?) to automatically remove all the formatting that was put into it. However, we give the user the option to override this by simply setting this user preference to “Only image formats”. If you are a user that prefers Direct Play over “correctness” of their ASS subtitles, you should just set this user preference once - and then forget. You shouldn’t need to switch back and forth between the “modes”.

Hope this helps explain why we have our current UX.

Ian

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Hey @IanDBird.

Thank you for explaining this to me. But you are simply wrong about the “you don’t have to switch back and forth” part.

My family never knows, if a film has an ASS subtitle, or a PGS or VOBSUB or SRT…
This is different from movie to movie. Not direct play any Full HD HEVC movies is not an option.

We need both, and we would prefer to not switch back and forth between movies.
Trust me, it does not work. ASS does not play with “automatic” and the others don’t direct play on “only image formats”. This is unusable in our daily life.

Really, my wife does not care about something which is “technically” not supported when the device and the software work seemingly okay if the user switches a software option.

Please add basic ASS support to automatic (or allow the user to permanently allow both on FireTV).

1 Like
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Hey @Ross

I’m sorry, I was mistaken when trying to determine why you’d need to switch the preference back and forth - you’re essentially trying to prevent any type of transcoding for any subtitle format (it was pre-coffee for me!).

I really wish the answer was as simple as just DPing ASS when set to “automatic”. It would solve the issue for you and your family, but it would also likely annoy other users (probably those that watch more Anime content) that previously their ASS subtitle were transcoding and looking correct and now they’re getting nothing more than just raw text.

There’s a few different ways we can look to improve things here though. Let me talk to the team actively working on subtitle related features to see what they want to do.

Ian

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Thank you again, @IanDBird.
I understand what you said about different use cases… would be perfect to have an option for that either on the player(s) or on the server level.

Thank you for taking care. Oh, and probably future Exoplayer will probably even improve ASS support. :slight_smile:

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This issue is the same for Android TV/Shield TV. It probably uses the same exoplayer version. What would be best is an extra option inside the PLEX preferences to select how to handle the .ass/.ssa subtitles specifically. That wouldn’t be too hard right? So the rest would stay the same, automatic would be good and another option to select convert styled subs to unstyped sub (ass/ssa to srt) or just play as designed and transcode the subtitles into the video with keeping the design.

Everything works fine in Kodi with PLEX plugin tho… automatic works for all types of subs…

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Hey @IanDBird

Any news here?
Any thoughts from the subtitle team on how to help/enhance without screwing things up for others? :wink:

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I’m sorry, I haven’t heard anything but i’ll reach out to the team again. I know that this question raised other questions about why we even have the “Burn Subtitles” setting at all now, given that a lot of our clients can handle subtitles client side - this may be why it’s taking a bit of time in case they decide to go and make further changes.

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Thx för all your efforts.

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Hey @IanDBird

I am not trying to be a pain…
This is just a short plea for help - it would be perfect if the developing team could act on this… :wink:

Thx again…

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Same here

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This is a much needed feature!

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Hi, i’ve been considering Plex and the subscription, but very disappointed by the lack of this feature.
Yes ASS is a “complex and rich” sub format. And that’s why it’s do damn good and powerful.
That’s also why Plex should support it. We have very powerful hardware nowadays in 2019 TVs and media-boxes, so there’s really no big excuse, except the programming work it represents.
MPC-HC and other video players have no trouble with it since 10+ years :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks in advance, hope the Plex team will tackle this.

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The only reason at all to switch to emby is the lack of support for subtitles, i would be willing to stay if even the image formats option worked, but that option seems to skip subtitle lines frequently.

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Has this been resolved with the new player in the FireTV Plex client?

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Nope, there are still issues with “Image Only” mode, it sometimes drops subtitles, and it can’t handle multiple active subtitles, e.g., when two or more people talk at overlapping times.

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I beg Plexie developers to do something about subtitle management.

I am using QNAP PMS with hardware transcoding (latest beta) and FireTVs as player devices.

I usually have MP4 and MKV files (HEVC and H.264) with embedded subtitles.

a) Plex isn’t respecting the flag if a subtitle track is set as “default”. This subtitle track is not pre-selected.
b) Plex is reading the title tag of the subtitle tags (can see via ExportTools), but is not showing these in the selection via UI (neither with Plex Web, nor with FireTV player).
c) graphical subtitles need another “subtitle mode” (automatic vs. “graphical only”) which you need to set in each player per movie separately.
d) 30-60% of all US movies come with “forced” subtitles in non-English countries like Germany. Plex shows subtitle tracks as “forced” but does not pre-select them (which is not the way “forced” is meant to be).
e) With the new video player in Fire-TV (and other devices), auto-transcoding is leading to an error instead of usable transcoding… With the new player switched on, selecting an ASS subtitle track while having the player device setting for subtitles as “automatic”, leads to an error message (Retry or Abort) instead of transcoding. (or vice versa with VOBSUB and setting to “graphics only”).

This is inacceptable and no smart subtitle handling.
I understand that for English speaking people this seems not a top priority. But hey… think twice.

Thank you for taking action on this.

1 Like
19

Since there does not seem to be significant progress on this issue (and with the current transcoding problem, things even get worse), I have made my mind up on how a future subtitle management could look like…

Please use that thread for future respnses since it is a more “complete” approach to get away from the current tech-based subtitle management in favour of a more user- and need-based approach.

I will edit the starting post of that thread if your input adds further value to it…

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4 posts were split to a new topic: Issues with subtitle selection