Server Version#: 4.140.0
Player Version#: (all of my players, Roku, web, Andriod tv, etc)
PGS subtitles are being rendered below the screen. When there are multiple lines sometimes the first line renders high enough you see part of it. This isn’t a problem when using srt files, but it kind of sucks to have to find srt files for all my movies that have embedded PGS subs, then have to skip past PGS subs every time I need to pick subtitles. It would be nice if these worked properly. I have tried changing the subtitle burn-in setting. This doesn’t change anything regardless of the setting.
I have noticed that it does not seem to be universal to all my bluray encodings, but all the ones that Plex renders badly are newer blurays, usually from 4K combo sets, where I used the non-4K disc to encode for plex. Older bluray encodes seem to be fine.
When these encodings are played in other media players (like VLC), the PGS subtitles render normally.
After the latest round of Plex server and Roku restarts, it is mysteriously working. Must be a very boundary bug situation. Which means it will suck to debug and probably not get fixed for ages.
Part of the issue is the fact that PGS and VOBSUB subtitles are actually graphics. And sometimes they don’t have just the dimensions of the letters themselves, but are the same size as the video picture (with all pixels except the actual text being transparent).
If you rip such a disc and then crop the video picture to remove black borders (or overall scale it down), the graphics of the subtitles and the video picture don’t fit each other anymore.
How this situation is handled during playback can differ across platforms, and is sometimes dependent on various additional factors, e.g. how the specific file is set up etc.
The safest way is to change “picture” subtitles into actual “text” subtitles. i.e. turn them into the SRT format. Those don’t care about the pixel dimensions of the video picture, but are rendered according to general preferences of each player. Which then allows you to scale them differently for large vs. small screen sizes, or change their color, or add a border or a background.
Thanks, maybe when I encoded them it dropped the black borders. Seems like that is the most likely culprit, though weirdly for some movies it started positioning them correctly again after some reboots. With some others I have found it still fails. I just sucks having to add srt subs for all those movies that already have pgs subs, just to scroll past all the pgs subs and select the srt. Especially since doing so in the Roku app is more of a headache since I don’t think it labels which subs are PGS and which are from srt.
Tip: external subtitles are preferred over internal, when automatic subtitle selection is active.
That of course is only valid until the user has selected a subtitle manually.
Interestingly, last night I was watching an encoding of my old Thor blu-ray and Plex was botching up the PGS subs as it has been. Then about 25% through the movie, Plex suddenly fixed itself and the subs started being displayed properly. So this behavior is not even consistent during the length of a single movie. It seems to sometimes fix itself as it pleases.
