Html in subtitles not rendered correctly and crashing rasplex

[Abmaonline]

At the moment I'm using rasplex 0.1.37 and besides the slow loading of sections, it works quite nice.

 

There is however one problem with movies containing srt subtitles and html-elements like .

 

First of all the html elements are not rendered correctly. The is replaced by [COLOR ffffffff]* (see attached screenshot). This looks like the internal format used by xbmx to apply styling to elements in skins, etc. 


 

Sample of srt:

7
00:04:50,399 --> 00:04:54,778
Replication Center Level 9,
we have a B 1 security alert. 

This doesn't look very good, but is not really a problem.

 

The second, more serious issue, is that (almost) all movies with these html elements in their subs, crash after some time. Sometimes it takes a few minutes, sometimes 1,5 hours. It seems to depend a bit on the amount of subs containing html tags, but it is no hard limit (can between 16 to 65 lines with ).

 

When crashed (first audio stop and after about 2s video stops) th GUI is not responding anymore, but the pi is still accessible through ssh, so I can do a normal reboot (saving my SD).

 

After restarting rasplex and continuing playback, the movie crashes quite fast again (within one minute) when subs are still on. With subs disabled, it is most of the time possible to finish the movie without any further problems.

 

I've had no crashes yet with movies without these html elements in their subs.

 

Since I use my synology nas as the plex media server and I have a lot of apple hardware, I convert all my movies to mp4 using subler, so no transcoding is needed and direct play can be used.

 

Anyone else encountering these problems or any suggestions how to fix this?

[Abmaonline]

Tried 0.1.38 in the same setup:

• the weird [COLOR] and * markup is still there and still crashes the movie (but it crashes at different moments in the movie);
• after crashing, Rasplex now automatically returns to the main menu, instead of hanging the whole GUI (so this is sort of an improvement).

[Abmaonline]

Still the same for 0.1.39 (but after crashing it doesn't immediately return to the main menu, but reboots rasplex first, I think this must have happend also with 0.1.38).

[a_wein]

Is this happening on OS X / Windows / Linux versions of PlexHT too?

If yes, you should report a bug there too..

[Abmaonline]

Is this happening on OS X / Windows / Linux versions of PlexHT too?

If yes, you should report a bug there too..

Is the OSX Plex Media Center the same as PlexHT?

I tried to get the PMC working on mountain lion, but it wouldn't show any subtitles for any movies (I can select them, but nothing shows)... All subs are embedded in mp4's using Subler.

[dlanor]

Is the OSX Plex Media Center the same as PlexHT?
 
I tried to get the PMC working on mountain lion, but it wouldn't show any subtitles for any movies (I can select them, but nothing shows)... All subs are embedded in mp4's using Subler.

PHT and PMC are separate projects, with PMC being the older one, eventually to be replaced entirely by PHT.
They have a lot in common, especially when using the default skins, but they are not identical.

Unfortunately PHT for PCs is still in the PlexPass beta stage (for Windows or Mac), so only PlexPass members can try it.
(I'm not sure about the Mac version, but the Windows version will not work without PlexPass validation, even if you find it...)

RasPlex is the only PHT implementation I know of which doesn't require PlexPass.

Best regards: dlanor

[Abmaonline]

Ok, so I can't test PlexHT on other platforms yet.

I did have another sd card for my pi with OpenELEC 3.0.6 and plexbmc 3.1.5 and it shows similar behavior: it doesn't show the [color] tags, but it does show the * tags and it does crash when playing movies with these subtitles. 

[dlanor]

Ok, so I can't test PlexHT on other platforms yet.
 
I did have another sd card for my pi with OpenELEC 3.0.6 and plexbmc 3.1.5 and it shows similar behavior: it doesn't show the [color] tags, but it does show the * tags and it does crash when playing movies with these subtitles.

I believe the PMS server has limited support for subtitles embedded in the video files.
I don't have any MP4s with such subtitles, but I have had several MKVs using subtitle tracks, and that never worked right.

So recently I've taken to extract the SRT subtitles (or either download or OCR-scan some if the originals were VOBSUB types), and then restream the video files to remove the unwanted embedded subtitles. Then I rescan the media with just the external subtitle files present, which then play without problems. Perhaps you can do the same for your MP4 files, though I'm not entirely sure which tools would be best for it. One great advantage of having external SRT files is that I can then use 'Aegisub' to edit out all the irritating 'SDH' subtitle entries found in many english subtitles (sound effect descriptions intended only for the hearing disabled).

For my MKV files I use the 'mkvtoolnix' package with the 'MKV Extract GUI2' utility added. The latter invokes an mkvtoolnix commandline exe to handle the track extraction, while the MMG.exe GUI which comes with mkvtoolnix handles the video re-streaming.

NB: Such re-streaming is extremely fast, since it doesn't modify any of the existing stream data, but simply re-arranges the existing streams adding or removing some, or even appending new data to them. (Excellent way to combine split-file movies to a single file.)

I believe that the "MP4Box" tool with its GUI add-ons can do something similar for MP4 files, though I haven't tested that myself yet.

Best regards: dlanor

[Abmaonline]

I always include the srt's into my mp4's so I can direct play them to my apple devices and have working subtitles.

Maybe I need to do some experimentation with separate subs again, to see how it works nowadays with my pi and apple devices.

[a_wein]

Ok, so I can't test PlexHT on other platforms yet.

I did have another sd card for my pi with OpenELEC 3.0.6 and plexbmc 3.1.5 and it shows similar behavior: it doesn't show the [color] tags, but it does show the * tags and it does crash when playing movies with these subtitles. 

Sounds like this is a more general XBMC issue. You create a XBMC feature request.

It may help to enable transcoding and try to get this fixed by the PMS transcoder...

[Abmaonline]

Ok, just extracted the subs from the movie and saved them as separate srt files (and removed the tracks from the mp4). After enabling the local media assets, the subs were identified again by PMS and could be selected.

Results:

• rasplex: no video transcoding, subtitles provided as separate track, now showing correctly: cool;
• atv3 plexconnect: no transcoding, but no subtitles either: not cool;
• ipad: video transcoding, subtitles rendered into the video: not cool;
• osx pmc: same as rasplex, (no video transcoding, subtitles as a separate track): cool. 

So it looks like it is something in the rasplex player and it can be solved by using the PMS transcoder, but since my main player is the atv3, I will leave all my subs in my mp4's for now.

Will also have a look at the xbmc ticket system...