Image-based subtitle overlay without transcoding

Feature Suggestions
1

I fully understand that the lack of support for image-based subtitles like the ubiquitous PGS format is not the fault of the plex developers, but rather the client hardware vendors. However, it’s still infuriating that simply enabling subtitles on bluray rips brings streaming to a crawl due to transcoding. Even with my 6-core i7 I can’t play any 4k content with subtitles. SRT subtitles found online are almost universally out of sync or have nonsense slipped in. Manually proofing SRT subtitles is impractical for a large media collection, especially when perfectly synced PGS subtitles are included on every BluRay.

I feel like this could be fixed on the plex-side in software. If the client software is capable of drawing overlays on the video for menus and playback statistics smoothly with no obvious impact on playback, surely the subtitle images could also be drawn? Thoughts?

2

@jamezracer said:
I fully understand that the lack of support for image-based subtitles like the ubiquitous PGS format is not the fault of the plex developers, but rather the client hardware vendors. However, it’s still infuriating that simply enabling subtitles on bluray rips brings streaming to a crawl due to transcoding. Even with my 6-core i7 I can’t play any 4k content with subtitles. SRT subtitles found online are almost universally out of sync or have nonsense slipped in. Manually proofing SRT subtitles is impractical for a large media collection, especially when perfectly synced PGS subtitles are included on every BluRay.

I feel like this could be fixed on the plex-side in software. If the client software is capable of drawing overlays on the video for menus and playback statistics smoothly with no obvious impact on playback, surely the subtitle images could also be drawn? Thoughts?

They already are. If you have, say, a nvidia shield tv and the file is direct played, then pgs and vobsubs are supported without transcode.

3

excellent! Any plans to migrate this to other clients like Samsung TVs ?

4

The only clients which are able to pull this off are:
PMP
OpenPHT
and Kodi with the Plex4Kodi Add-On

If you don’t need 4K or HEVC support, you could do with a Raspberry Pi 3 and Rasplex (=OpenPHT) or ‘PMP embedded’ on it.
Or use an ODroid C2 if you need 4K and/or HEVC. (Running OpenPHT).

5

2021 clean-up: duplicate