Playing movie with captions on caused buffering issue

General Discussions
1

Because my hearing is not so great I always burn movies with closed captions.

Without the captions on the movies play beautifully. But, with the captions on it stalls and buffers every 60-seconds or so making the movie unwatchable.

Is there anything I can do about this?

2

These subtitles are “pixel”-based. Almost no Plex client supports these. So the server must "burn them in"to the video picture, which really is “transcoding”.
I guess your Plex server’s cpu is not strong enough to do that in real time.

Options:

  • use a different Plex client which is able to handle these subtitles (only OpenPHT and PMP do, AFAIK)
  • convert the subtitles into a text-based format (SRT), which is supported by far more Plex clients Subtitle Edit
  • use a stronger Plex server
  • pre-process (“optimize”) your videos by burning in the subtitles before you watch them
3

Got it. Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. So, when I rip them I should use “direct render to video”?

4

@Bob_Hatcher said:
Got it. Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. So, when I rip them I should use “direct render to video”?

If you are OK with subtitles showing up for others users as well, sure.
(IF you are sharing your server with other users, that is)