NVidia Shield: SRT subtitles causing "burn subtitles" to activate when audio is also transcoded

[rwoffice]

@sixones

What’s happening here is that your connected to a sound device that doesn’t support PCM 5.1 and your Android device doesn’t support AC3 decoding natively, so we are using our AC3 software decoder for stereo content. When you switch to AC3 5.1 because we can’t output PCM 5.1, we can’t use our software decoder so the client asks the server to transcode into a codec that we can output on your Android device without dropping channels.

Ah, thank you for the clarification. Appreciate it.

[sethgregory]

Thanks so much for your reply, @sixones - I really appreciate it. It helps just knowing somebody at Plex is aware that this is an issue and that it is being actively addressed. If you have time, could you comment on what factors limit this issue primarily to the Android version of the Plex client? Is it an Exoplayer HLS implementation issue? (I can successfully direct-stream video with subtitles and transcoded audio on both Plex Media Player on the desktop, as well as Kodi with the Plex plugin on Android/AndroidTV.)

[Dion250]

This needs to fixed… The Plex player is on ExoPlayer2 now… It can direct play SRT fine.

The only reason they had to burn them in was because they would go out of sync from a HLS bug that was fixed already in Exoplayer2.

Stop Transcoding Video / Burning Subtitles just because Audio is transcoding… It’s NOT Needed.

[Ranger34]

@sixones - you are awesome for responding. For me on Nvidia Shield, .srt subtitles do not work even when I’m using ac3, which my soundbar definitely supports. In fact, .srt subtitles don’t work at all unless I set it to “burn always”. This isn’t a problem with any other client I’ve used… and I know lots of other people have complained that .srt subs simply will not work since the update. I’ve noticed that sometimes when I select my .srt, it will just show chapter xx instead of the subs. This isn’t a problem with Kodi with the Plex addon, nor is it a problem online.

Any chance Plex knows about this and is fixing it? It’s been like this for me for months. Again, thanks for your help!

[rwoffice]

@Ranger34

I’ve noticed that sometimes when I select my .srt, it will just show chapter xx instead of the subs. This isn’t a problem with Kodi with the Plex addon, nor is it a problem online.

This is a different issue than the one for this thread. See this thread for more people with the same problem you’re having:

How to Hide Chapter Number and Show Forced Subtitles (possible bug on Plex for Amazon Fire TV?)

I’m using Plex for Amazon Fire TV. I have my forced subtitle file named “War for the Planet of the Apes (2017).eng.forced.srt” to go along with my movie named “War for the Planet of the Apes (2017).m4v” I select subtitles from the screen and find "English (SRT Forced External) as an option. But, rather than the forced subtitles showing, I get “Chapter #” displayed. When I view on my laptop using Chrome, the subtitles work as expected. Is there a problem with the app? It shows as Version 6.…

[Ranger34]

I’ll check it out, thank you @rwoffice.

[blodsbror]

Is this also and issue with PGS subtitles, and not just SRT subtitles ?

[MasterIroh]

PGS are picture based subtitles so they have to be burned in if the client can’t play them natively

[aptalca]

@sixones

The limitation itself is in the HLS protocol which only supports subtitles over WebVTT, which we currently don’t support.

Just curious, is this really a big technical obstacle? Emby android app has been transcoding subtitles to webvtt since forever and it just works with hls streaming. I mean it’s really just text conversion, it doesn’t seem to be that difficult to implement.

This is a huge inconvenience to plex users on Android based clients including fire and android tv. The moment you turn on subtitles, server load is a lot more, everything loads slower, seeking becomes almost unusable.

This is the reason I’ve been using emby for local/lan streaming

[Dion250]

It’s just an excuse for them… They are both text based subtitles and it can be converted on the fly in less then 5 seconds.

Here is an example of a line from an srt.

00:36:14,339 --> 00:36:18,051
We should have come here ages ago.

and here is an example of a line in WebVVT format.

00:36:14.339 --> 00:36:18.051
We should have come here ages ago.

Apparently periods and comma’s are too advanced to change in real time.

[sethgregory]

I’m sincerely hoping that with the latest update and focus on improving the subtitle experience (and the functionality of the Android player) that solving this issue will be among the priorities of the dev team. @sixones - fingers crossed that I’ll soon be able to make use of my Shield TV Plex client again.

[MasterIroh]

This is a major issue that causes huge loads of stress on our servers, text based subtitles being such a big problem for Plex is really strange.

[yeeahnick]

Same problem here. Everything direct plays on Roku but transcodes on PS4 when subtitiles are used.

[FMisplon]

Any news on this?

[rwoffice]

@sixones

The limitation itself is in the HLS protocol which only supports subtitles over WebVTT, which we currently don’t support.

Is there any reason not to just convert SRT subtitles to WebVTT? It’s super easy to do, takes literally only like 1 second to convert, and it would solve this whole problem. There’s even free websites where you can convert, so it can’t be that difficult. Here’s an example:

https://subtitletools.com/convert-to-vtt-online

[MasterIroh]

Yeah it’s very strange that Plex doesn’t offer proper support to the most used subtitle format (srt) when the only thing needed to be done with the subtitles is to change commas to dots in the timestamps.

[mont64]

Yeah. It’s months and still no fix for this. It’s really driving me to click on reject payment on my paypal. I guess I’m really, really close.

[lledr]

Hi,

@sixones, you talked 4 months ago about trying to remove limitations (HLS not supporting SRT & Plex not supporting WebVTT). Any update/decision on this?

Thanks.

[sethgregory]

@sixones any kind of update would be greatly appreciated, even one that says “it’s on our roadmap but we’re not there yet.” Please know that this is just as infuriating now as it was when I created this thread eight months ago about it, and is something that those of us on the Android client deal with on a daily basis. Thanks in advance.

[charlie2alpha]

Speaking for myself I just don’t use the Plex client anymore. As I am not a native English or Japanese speaker (I like Japanese anime) I need subtitles 100% of the time (ok, I understand English very well but I’ll always miss the occasional word or phrase, not to mention weird accents etc).

As a consequence anything that the Shield can’t direct play will cause a full transcode if I use the Plex client, something unacceptable. So I gave up on it and switched to Kodi as my playback client using PlexKodiConnect to connect those two.

Nevertheless, that solution is not for everyone especially if you have to deal with multiple servers, or just remote servers. Plex for Kodi was a good solution for those cases but it seems abandoned for months now.

In any case I’m not surprised with this dragging on, the direction of Plex as a company seems to be unstable lately with questionable decisions. Just look at the Roku client section and the public uproar that was caused…