Will support for CJK characters ever arrive for the Plex player plugin for Roku streaming devices? It’s quite frustrating that I can’t see any non-Roman character track titles, and greatly diminishes the experience.
It looks like various users have been asking for this as far back as 2015 - please prioritise.
What Roku device are you using? I have Non-Roman characters in my media and there’s no issue with them showing up.
I am one of those who reported this back in 2015, on the Roku 3. The problem is still there in the Plex Roku app. Maybe a newer Roku has this support. I moved to an nVidia Shield, so it’s unlikely I’ll get a new Roku.
I have a few items in various languages. I will check them on my Roku and my iPad, to see which ones render correctly.
Results:
All titles rendered correctly on my iPad
Roku (rendered correctly):
– Cyrillic
– Greek
– Danish
Roku (failed to render):
– Chinese
– Japanese
– Korean
So as the OP stated, it is titles in CJK that are failing to render. Other language encodings seem to be okay.
This seems to be an issue with Roku itself. If the Roku OS/System doesn’t have the proper language packs installed by Roku, then it can’t show non-latin characters. This is exactly what happened on an old Samsung S3 I had, which couldn’t display non-latin characters because Samsung didn’t put the proper language files into the OS. Without those language pack resources the system doesn’t know how to display them.
So from what I know, Roku does not include CJK inside the OS. However, the app developer can choose to include the fonts inside the app to support it. Good examples are Netflix & Youtube, in which both support CJK fully. I suspect Plex not doing this to reduce its app file size…
Yes, Roku should include these languages, but since it doesn’t, Plex should really do this. Not sure why Plex is being very resistant with this, since it was a suggestion for years.
The issue is the size of CJK. We are not able to incorporate the asset as part of the build since the channel itself has to be under 4 megabytes. As for loading it on startup (it’s a little more nuanced) we only have ~50mb of temporary space to use, which is shared with the UI (e.g. images you see on screen). We have had hopes Roku would build in support, but they have mentioned the size requirements for the font support is the issue. I can’t speak for channels like Netflix, only know they usually have more access to native integrations on the platform.
I’ve been following Plex CJK support on Roku for years and it’s the first time I have seen a decent response from an employee, so thanks.
Now… The fact about Netflix/Youtube having more native access - is that because they are a more closer partner than Plex is? Any way Plex can reach out to Roku for support on this further?
Maybe it’s possible for Plex to open up a Beta/Alpha channel for Roku users who would like to use CJK, and with that may be some tradeoffs (slower, worse UI, etc…).
Personally I have a Roku TV, and I have Korean support on the apps I need (Youtube,Netflix), but because I also need plex, I end up having to hook up another streaming device.
I am sure there are some workarounds, and if Plex can figure something out, this would open up a lot of opportunities for the Asian users who are also Roku users.
My two cents
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