But I believe that the Plex community would like to step that up even more. So here is my feature request, vote if you would like to have it by clicking the green "Like This" at the bottom right of this post.
The actual feature request:
Build in a feature in PMS which auto-converts text subtitles (for example .SRT subtitle files) into tx3g subtitle files. The text-based subtitle files are so small that keeping a TX3G version of the same file in the database would not increase the database file size noticeably. Why do this? Well:
1, This would mean that the movies/episodes could be remuxed (from for example MKV into MP4) and then sent to your devices (instead of being transcoded) without us losing our subtitles.
2, We could use the default iOS subtitle icon which is always available while the movie is playing (this is only possible today when it is a mp4 file with TX3G subs).
3. We could use Apples way of rendering subtitles on the screen, which is very polished (this is only possible today with TX3G subtitle files).
Ow yes... the post I linked to was about supporting tx3g subtitles, and this one is about converting srt into tx3g. I'm sorry.
This is the one feature I would still like to see in plex. It shouldn't be even that hard, subler does it and it's source is publicly available: https://code.google.com/p/subler/source/checkout
Atrus, I thought you had a hotline to the bosses' homes :)
Seeing as most feature requests have a sort of a one year incubation period, perhaps in the meantime we could discuss ways to automate this process in our fileservers.
Muxing is a fast process, I guess it'd be nice to convert my mkv's and avi's into m4v's, provided the video is h.264 and can be passthrough'ed.
Seeing as most feature requests have a sort of a one year incubation period, perhaps in the meantime we could discuss ways to automate this process in our fileservers.
On linux, this should be fairly easy to automate using a cronjob that searches for mkv and avi files and muxes them into m4v with mp4box. On OS X, this can be done to with a similiar proces, but replacing mp4box with subler-cli.
For me this is not an option, since I want to keep my original files seeding as a torrent and don't want to store duplicates of files.
Atrus, I thought you had a hotline to the bosses' homes :)
Of course I do, but we do not always agree what is most important. So creating a thread here is a way even for us to gain an understanding of how many agrees with a few of our ideas :)
Plus, this is a good way of keeping record of all the good ideas if they are not prio 1 ;)
I would like to test this. What file extension should I use after manually converting srt subtitles in order for PMS to recognise subtitles?
EDIT:
I have tried both *.ttxt and *.tx3g but none of them seem to work.
I do not think PMS recognize those two suffixes. It is quite possible they are only noticed by the mp4 scanner part of the Local Media Agent agent. But I am not sure about that. Hopefully I can get ahold of some of the devs that can answer that with a higher level of certainty :)
As I am planning on getting a new and cheaper Synology NAS, one that would not handle video transcoding, it would be the only way to watch movies/shows on my iPad without transcoding kicking in.
Can I bump this topic? This would avoid transcoding for a lot of users with iOS devices, resulting in big quality and cpu time advances. It should be fairly easy to implement too.
I love watching movies with subtitles on the iPad and the present way of handling it is neither efficient nor esthetically pleasing (subtitles on the movie when there are black bars is a shame).
So for now, I'll stay with XBMC on iPad until Plex can handle subtitles.
I first thought it'd be better to allow external subtitles as is (like nPlayer, XBMC, AVPlayer and so many others do), but this actually seems like a better solution. It'd be really nice to have soft subtitling integrated with iOS!
What should be the extension for TX3G files? I tried ttxt yesterday but PMS doesn't detect it as a sub file.
Thanks.
I think TX3G files are only supported when they are embedded. I think. I will ask the boys when I talk to them later on and see if I can get a good answer.
I got a hold of Chris and he agreed with me. Plex has no support for external TX3G subs. Come to think of it... I have never seen a subtitle file which has TX3G format. Do they exist outside of a video file?
Ok. So, how could you convert and add them to the database? Does it need to remux the video when you add it?
Thanks for your fast answer.
Windows users use a tool called mp4box or something similar. Mac users has a few alternatives. For example iSubtitle (you can find it in the Mac App Store for 15 bucks or something like that). Open up the mp4/m4v, add the srt subtitle, press save and it will get you a fresh remux of the original but this time with tx3g subs instead of srt.
