Option to try convert subtitles to DirectPlay able format so it doesn't transcode all the video to burn the subtitles

Feature Suggestions
1

Hello everybody.

Being tired of plex transcode all my anime collection that has subtitles in ass format built-in I decided to make some research and using ffmpeg I was able to extract the ass files and convert it to .srt with a simple script.

This made me think, why doesn’t plex do this by default? It converts srt to ass to play on browsers, why doesn’t plex do it around. I understand that html tags can mess up, but at least give the option to user to remove it, so it plays without transcoding. Maybe with a little more work plex team could find a way to convert even pgs to srt. I think this is a feature that isn’t that difficult to implement and is very useful to users in general.

For the curious, my script:

for i in *.mkv;
  do name=`echo "$i" | cut -d'.' -f1`
  echo "$name"
  ffmpeg -i "$i" -vn -an -codec:s ass "${name}.ass"
done


for i in *.ass;
  do name=`echo "$i" | cut -d'.' -f1`
  echo "$name"
  ffmpeg -i "$i" -c:s srt  "${name}.es.srt"
  sed -e 's/<[^>]*>//g' "${name}.es.srt" > changed.txt && mv changed.txt "${name}.es.srt"
done

rm *.ass

Extracts ass, converts to srt then removes html tags from the file.

Being able to do it this easily, I would love Plex Team to implement a similar function on Plex.

2

PMS already can do that. If your subs are being trnscoded there is something else going on. Please start a new post with details on what you are playing and logs from the client and PMS.

3

Can’t you just output to SRT in one step? I admit it’s late xD

ffmpeg -i "$i" -vn -an -c:s srt "${name}.es.srt"