UPDATE! For me, this turned out to be an unexpected change in the ROKU settings. It had nothing to do with Plex and everything to do with the fact that I didn’t know enough about subtitles to effectively troubleshoot.
OttoKerner set me on the right path and once I had a better idea of the behind-the-scenes situation, I found that something had turned on text effects in the ROKU, causing that weird and barely readable font shown in my screen capture.
I’ve spend a lot of time trying to identify the cause of a weird subtitle font that just showed up one day and thought that this might help someone else avoid the hassle.
I have an HTPC dedicated to Plex and my content. The HTPC connects to a HT receiver > Roku > Samsung TV.
My hearing is poor, so I’ve started burning subtitles into my movies and shows, not .SRT files or whatever, burned in. Just yesterday I went to watch a movie and the subtitle font was as shown in the screen capture linked below; it’s all but unreadable on the actual TV from a distance.
The subtitles are normal on my computer and directly on the HTPC through Plex. Displaying on the TV via ROKU, (with and without the receiver active), ALL video content EXCEPT for MP4 was affected.
Testing eventually led to me looking at the ROKU and sure enough, that was it. In ROKU settings, I already had the subtitle set to Yellow, but somehow a text effect got turned on, making it virtually unreadable to me. I turned that back off and that fixed the issue for all of the affected videos.
I believe that Plex can directly play MP4 files and must transcode other formats such as AVI, so I GUESS that the transcoding process somehow allowed the ROKU to mess up the display??
Just an FYI: Your screen shots indicate, that you did NOT “burn in” your subtitles.
They might be inside the same file as the video, but they still exist as a separate data stream.
This is called “internal subtitles” or “muxed-in subtitles”.
If the subtitles were actually burned-in, they would be a fixed part of the video picture. With no way to either disable them, change their size, font, or color.
Wow, thank you!! Yes, it shows First Text Stream in that video as English, UTF-8
Your reply answers one of the questions I have about what’s going on here: HOW anything could be messing with the subtitles. I’m going to have to find a video that I KNOW I used Handbrake / Burn In and see what that says.
You probably used MKVtoolnix to add the subtitle stream. But MKVtoolnix doesn’t do transcoding (which would be needed to actually “burn in” the subtitles).
MKVtoonix only does “multiplex” (or short “mux”).
I’m working on my Predator-Alien series BD discs now. MakeMKV to rip them and MediaInfo shows the PGS text stream. Handbrake (because I can’t sacrifice the uncompressed storage space) and MediaInfo does NOT show the text stream, but the subtitles are working great.
