Modify Subtitles (Placement on screen)

[Guinea]

I am asking this question because I do not know what the actual issue is just yet. I have a movie theater setup in my home. I run PMS on a FreeNAS custom built server. I have the PMS feeding Plex to a series of PS4s around the house. The primary use is an NVIDIA Shield that goes to a Projector. I have a retractable screen with electronic masking. This allows me to bounce from 1.78:1 to scope and vice versa depending on the movie. I rip the movies from my Blu-Ray collection in lossless 1:1 MKV Passthrough format.

Here is the issue. Last night, I was watching a movie (Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows). I often use subtitles for my movies. I moved the film to a scope setup, but this pushed the subtitles off the screen. The subtitles were positioned half way on the screen and half way on the black bar below it. My question is this: What controls that? Is it possible to have them moved up by something on Plex? Is this something that is embedded into the way the film uses subtitles? I don’t really know what my options are, so I am curious how to deal with this and still be able to use my scope setup when the aspect ratio is appropriate.

[OttoKerner]

The issue here is that Plex doesn’t know that there are black borders in the picture.
All it knows is that there is a video file with measures of 1920 x 1080 pixels (16:9 aspect ratio).
Since Cinemascope is wider than this (~ 21:9), those movies are stored on BluRay with black borders ‘baked in’ on top and bottom.
But as initially said, Plex doesn’t know that this is really a cinemascope picture. So it places the subtitles on the bottom of what it thinks is still the video picture.

The only way around this in the Plex ecosystem (at least which is known to me) is to take this rip and crop the picture to remove the black borders.

Of course this means re-coding the file which

1. takes quite some time
2. may reduce the picture quality (although only slightly or even unnoticeable, if done with care)