I’ve noticed with subtitles files that are labeled “MOV_TEXT” on the Plex Apple TV player will occasionally show up huge. I started noticing that this was a consistent problem whenever voiceovers were happening. Tonight I tried playing the same episode of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1984-1994 BBC Series) on the Apple TV app and then on a Roku app to see how the same subtitles rendered on multiple players, and the text that showed up as huge on the Apple TV showed up as italicized in the Roku. I also used FFMPEG to export the subtitles as an .SRT file and looked at the weird looking subtitles with a text editor and confirmed that there was an flag around the text that looked giant on the Apple TV app.
If it help to look through the log files, the file that was streamed to both apps is named “Sherlock Holmes.S02E05.The Man with the Twisted Lip.mp4”, it was watched around 8:00 PM CST on Saturday 2-26-2022, it was encoded from a DVD using Handbrake, and an example of the weird looking subtitle occurs at 21:22 into the stream with the text “By the time we returned the door was unbolted” (which covered around ¾ of the screen when displayed on the Apple TV)
MOV_TEXT means it’s a text subtitle in an MP4 file.
But you say it was encoded from a DVD using Handbrake? Did you modify the settings to extract the Closed Captions track?
For text-based subtitles, Plex on the Apple TV should be obeying the tvOS Settings → Accessibility → Subtitles and Captioning settings. Does that change anything?
I do use Handbrake to include closed captioning as well as any other subtitle files that might come with a given DVD.
I’ve included a screenshot of an example of a DVD I might rip and how the “subtitles” tab would look.
I have tried changing the Apple TV’s global settings and this does nothing.
It’s not merely that the subtitled italics are huge. It’s that text that’s supposed to render as italicized doesn’t render as italicized but does render as huge.
Text that isn’t flagged as italicized renders normally.
Yeah, I can reproduce that with your sample. I think the enlarged rendering size for Italics is a Plex bug.
One option in Plex is Settings → Subtitles → Override Subtitles Styles → Off. You’ll lose the italics, but it fixes the size problem.
Another option in Plex is Settings → Advanced → Use Old Video Player → On.
The Old Video Player is the default tvOS player engine, and the system-wide tvOS caption settings apply. This works correctly - rendering at a reasonable size, italic when appropriate.
