If not supporting Ture HD 7.1 is excusable, then not supporting ASS subtitles is an extremely stupid and arrogant issue of PLEX itself!!!
It is still supported,
Recommend reading these support articles about Subtitles: Category : Using Subtitles | Plex Support
Using ASS subtitles leads to transcoding, and using Image Only leads to formatting loss. I donât think this kind of perfunctory support to be support.
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Depends on the clients youâre using. For example iOS/iPadOS/tvOS fully support ass subtitles.
I have the full experience of using ass sub on apple device. And Iâd like use plex on Android smart phone and TV, is Android unworthy using PLEX? Although I can use ass sub though kodi add on, why do we need so much trouble? This is a commercial software, not free.
The problem is ASS subs are closer to a scripting language than a subtitle format, and rendering them can require high processing power. Most streaming devices really arenât that powerful for general computation. They only work for streaming video by leaning on their hardware acceleration for very common video codecs. If the SoC on a plain Fire Stick had to actually decode full HD video in software it would probably croak.
You can see this is you try playing back, say Hi10P video with ASS subs in Kodi on a lower-end Android TV device. 10-bit video is not a common format with hardware acceleration on the chipsets used in streaming devices.
So it has to be all handled in software in the devices processor. You might be okay with 720p, but 1080p at a decent bitrate for video and you will start seeing judders and slowdowns in video playback, especially once you hit scenes with lots of on-screen typesetting or kfx.
Apple TV devices are much more powerful hardware-wise than many Android TV devices. The most notable exception being the NVidia Shield. So I guess if Plex had a separate client, specific to the Shield and some of the more-powerful SBC people use to make Android devices, that could be set up with mpv or some other underlying player that supports ASS natively. But, would they go to the trouble of making a separate client app for such a small subset of devices? No.
What they could do is start actively developing the Plex Kodi Add-On again. Like, give it the UNO interface all the other clients have now. If they did that, I would probably just change to using it full-time on my Shield Pro.
The Fire Stick 4K, and Fire Stick 1080p (2020 model), technically supports Hi10P, but the results are very hit or miss. They seem to require the color space be defined in the file and a lot of content does not have this information listed in the video stream.
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On Android devices, Plex uses ExoPlayer, part of Android, as the video player.
ExoPlayerâs SSA/ASS subtitle support is essentially non-existent.
As a result, Plex must burn the subtitles into the video stream to make sure they display correctly.
There is an enhancement request to improve ExoPlayerâs handling of SSA/ASS subtitles. You can follow the progress on GitHub: Support SSA/ASS styling · Issue #8435 · google/ExoPlayer · GitHub
Iâm so tired of plex throwing out this same excuse. Plex is using the exp player codebase but wants to contribute nothing back. Treating android customers as second class citizens along the way. The remark about android streaming devices not being powerful enough was just stupid.
Plex continues to be the biggest disappointment well into 2022. Its been years of this crap.
The funny part about this is that it took emby devs about 1 - 2 months after switching from MPV to exoplayer on android to implement ASS subtitle rendering, while its been years since people have been asking plex where they give the same âexcuseâ of the exoplayer devs not implementing it.
Iâve been getting the feeling from a lot of âtechâ companies lately that they just donât actually have any actual coders on staff, or certainly not enough for the kind of product they run, and that most/all development work is outsourced or contracted on a project by project basis. So many half baked âminimum viable productsâ out there with showstopping regressions that get rolled out and then take weeks or months to resolve (if ever). So many obvious features left unimplemented or half broken or user pain points that would be relatively simple to address but never are.
I mean I know that software developers are hard to find and of those that are around, less than half are anything more than stack overflow copy-pasters. But even taking that into account, the only explanation I can think of for why so many companies just canât seem to manage the simplest things with there software is willfully inadequate staffing.
I met a new issue recently. When a movie with internal pgs subtitles was played on Xbox series x, the transcode occured(Auto or Image only). However it was directly played on Sony TV(Auto). What a stupid issueâŠ
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