Howdy all - I recently purchased a Synology DS224+ to run Plex in my home. Most clients are Roku Smart TVs.
Due to disabilities, subtitles are 100% required in our house. So I’ve been experimenting with different types of subs like text-based SRT and image-based PGS.
The Roku client can’t handle image-based subs, so if I’m using PGS subs, those need to be burned in server-side before being streamed to the player. At first my little 224+ couldn’t handle this at all, but after disabling hardware acceleration in the Plex server settings, it’s working! (Almost.)
The “almost” part comes down to what’s in the title: a resolution mismatch. PGS subtitles are meant to be projected on a 1920x1080 raster area. But I typically crop out letterboxing, resulting in something like 1920x800 for a widescreen 2.39 film, for example.
The mismatch results in vertically “squished” subtitles. Example:
CORRECT Subs:
SQUISHED Subs:
I finally came across this old thread which describes the problem perfectly. The recommended fix is to set stretch-image-subs-to-screen=yes. So I SSH’ed into my Synology but couldn’t locate any Plex or other .conf files where this setting might live.
So my question boils down to: Is there a server-side setting (GUI or text file) that will render the subs in the correct pixel aspect ratio? Something like stretch-image-subs-to-screen?
Any help here would be greatly appreciated.
Some other things I’ve tried or considered:
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Don’t crop out letterboxing. Seems wasteful, tho.
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Convert PGS to SRTs. This works, but involves a lot of extra steps. And the typography of SRT subs is generally not as attractive.
I’m on Plex Server Version#: 1.29.2.6364
