I’ve been playing with Jellyfin a bit this weekend. It’s still ultimately pretty rough, but here’s something interesting. While it still unfortunately transcodes the video stream to my Shield when playing files containing complex .ASS subs (despite happily direct playing them to my Android phone, funnily enough), it manages to transcode the video - including the problematic file I used as my example in the OP - without anything like the drastic loss of image quality that Plex produces even at its highest quality transcoder settings as shown in my original screenshots.
With default server settings there is some minor image quality loss (again, nothing like what Plex produces at its highest quality settings):
At higher settings, any quality loss is not easily discernible (at least to my eye):
So we also now know at this point that it is possible to transcode even a low bitrate video like this for subtitle burn-in and streaming without becoming an artifact ridden mess.
The fact that the dashboard is capable of giving a human readable reason for why it is having transcode the video is a nice touch as well (hint hint).
Obviously being a small FLOSS project with developers contributing in their spare time, Jellyfin lacks a lot of the nice peripheral features that Plex has. Nevertheless, it is mind boggling that it handles basic playback so much more gracefully like this.
Plex is a commercial product and many of us who are stuck with this problem are paying customers. Shiny new features like the ace new intro skip are great to see, but many of us can never use them since we’re stuck using barely maintained or unsupported clients as a result of this issue. Whether you tackle it from the client end (is the upstream change to Exoplayer’s handling of these subs as linked earlier in the thread implemented in the Plex client yet?) or from the server end by doing something about the transcoder needlessly butchering the stream - it is really past time to do something about this.
