Picture gets pixelated after playing for a few seconds with subtitles turned on

[kennlopez01]

Server Version#: 1.32.8.7639
Player Version#: Samsung TV 2017
When I have subtitles turned on, the picture gets pixelated after a few seconds. When I turn off subtitles, it plays fine again. I need the subtitles!
Also for this video, I have to untick Allow Direct Play so that it can play on my TV.
I have attached the logs from my plex media server.
Plex Media Server Logs_2023-11-26_13-07-27.zip (4.7 MB)

[ChuckPa]

Without seeing the TV logs, the first thing I suspect is the video quality setting in the TV.

Have you confirmed they are not at the default 2 Mbps ? You will want to increase it.

Your logs confirm it’s transcoding because of the subtitles (expected).

PGS subtitles require burn-in. Try to avoid them and you’ll have better results

[kennlopez01]

I’ve set the video quality to 20 Mbps 4K (is this recommended?) on the client and the problem was still there. I then unticked Allow Direct Play and it was better.

Initially video quality was set to Original.

“PGS subtitles require burn-in. Try to avoid them and you’ll have better results”
Can you please explain what this is and how to avoid them.

Thanks!

[ChuckPa]

When Plex imports the media information for a movie/series you add to your library,
it catalogs what’s actually in the file.

For all your movies & episodes, you can look at each one.

To do this:

1. Hover your mouse over the poster
2. The ellipsis will show in the lower right corner
3. Click it and a menu will show
4. At the bottom is “Get Info”. This is the information about the media file itself.

In this example, we’re looking at one of my movies.

At the top, we can see:

1. Where the file is in my library
2. Left column shows us characteristics of the video in the file
3. Middle column shows us more info about the file,
4. The right column tells us specifics of the streams (video, audio, and subtitles)

If you scroll to the bottom, you’ll see here that I have SRT (text-based) subtitles.

These (SRT) are the most portable. SRT, ASS, and SSA are all text-based and easy for Plex to process.

Text-based subtitles don’t require burning unless there’s no way to convert them (there usually is) to something the TV/player will accept.

Image based subtitles, those which require burning, are PGS, VOBSUB, and DVDRIP.

There are tools (mkvtoolnix is one) which allows you to remove unwanted tracks (subtitles) from a video file as well as add new tracks to a file without re-encoding the file. They run very quickly.

When I rip a bluray disc, I uncheck the boxes on the tracks I don’t want.
When I capture TV shows (OTA), i get what I get and then must go back and edit the files. This is where MKVtoolnix helps me. I remove anything I don’t want (like subtitles) and add new subtitles (SRT-text based) if I need.

There’s a lot to learn and there are a lot of tutorials available via google.

Hopefully some of these terms I’ve given you will help you start to figure out how to curate your media to be the way you want it.

[kennlopez01]

Wow, there is a lot to learn!
I did what you said and saw that there were quite a few SRTs in my source. I din’t see any PGS, VOBSUB or DVDRIP.
I used MKVToolnix and removed the SRTs which I didn’t need and it now works! And I could leave Allow Direct Play ticked.
Looks like I need to do this for all my sources which have multiple language SRTs? Any idea why this is happening?

Thanks @ChuckPa by the way!

[ChuckPa]

There’s a limit to the number of how many subtitle tracks TV’s will support.

I’ve seen problems when 29 subtitle tracks are present but work with 28.
It all depends on the TV.

I can’t imagine who needs 28 tracks (that’s more than a family & friends IMHO).

As long as you keep it reasonable, (less than 8?) you’ll be fine.

You’ll find the limits of what your TVs and players can accept.
You adjust from there and work for the least-capable equipment.