Plex App forces CPU intensive transcode for subtitles while DLNA does not

Plex Players Smart TVs
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1

Server Version#: 1.18.8.2468
Player Version#: Latest

Playing the same video file h264/AAC Stereo/ASS subs through the LG Plex app forcing a CPU intensive transcode to burn-in the subtitles even though this is not necessary. Playing the same file through LG DLNA app using PMS built-in DLNA server with subs enabled starts immediately without any noticable CPU utilization.

Below are what I considered the relevant parts of the log, but I can include more if required.

Plex App:
Mar 30, 2020 03:53:54.829 [0x7f90695d6700] DEBUG - MDE: analyzing media item 507
Mar 30, 2020 03:53:54.829 [0x7f90695d6700] DEBUG - MDE: E27 - It’s On! The Special Operation to Bring Down Kaido!: Direct Play is disabled
Mar 30, 2020 03:53:54.829 [0x7f90695d6700] DEBUG - MDE: E27 - It’s On! The Special Operation to Bring Down Kaido!: media must be transcoded in order to use the hls protocol
Mar 30, 2020 03:53:54.829 [0x7f90695d6700] DEBUG - MDE: E27 - It’s On! The Special Operation to Bring Down Kaido!: selected subtitle cannot be converted to a compatible format, burning into video stream
Mar 30, 2020 03:53:54.829 [0x7f90695d6700] DEBUG - MDE: E27 - It’s On! The Special Operation to Bring Down Kaido!: avoiding video remux due to burned subtitle stream
Mar 30, 2020 03:53:54.829 [0x7f90695d6700] DEBUG - MDE: E27 - It’s On! The Special Operation to Bring Down Kaido!: no remuxable profile found, so video stream will be transcoded
Mar 30, 2020 03:53:54.830 [0x7f90695d6700] DEBUG - MDE: Cannot direct stream video stream due to profile or setting limitations
Mar 30, 2020 03:53:58.485 [0x7f90a199a700] DEBUG - Play progress on 190 ‘It’s On! The Special Operation to Bring Down Kaido!’ - got played 756000 ms by account 1!
Mar 30, 2020 03:53:58.510 [0x7f90a199a700] DEBUG - We’re going to try to auto-select an audio stream for account 1.
Mar 30, 2020 03:53:58.512 [0x7f90a199a700] DEBUG - Selecting best audio stream for part ID 507 (autoselect: 1 language: en)
Mar 30, 2020 03:53:58.512 [0x7f90a199a700] DEBUG - Audio Stream: 1229, Subtitle Stream: 1230
Mar 30, 2020 03:53:58.515 [0x7f90a199a700] DEBUG - [Now] User is ------------ (ID: 1)
Mar 30, 2020 03:53:58.515 [0x7f90a199a700] DEBUG - [Now] Device is webOS (LG OLED65C7P-J).
Mar 30, 2020 03:53:58.515 [0x7f90a199a700] DEBUG - [Now] Profile is HTML TV App

DLNA:
DLNADeviceName.lge.com: %5bLG%5d%20webOS%20TV%20OLED65C7P; User-Agent: Linux/4.4.3-119.drd4tv.5 UPnP/1.0 LGE WebOS TV LGE_DLNA_SDK/1.6.0/05.80.55 DLNADOC/1.50; Host: 192.168.1.179:32469; Content-Length: 718; Content-Type: text/xml; charset=“utf-8”
Mar 30, 2020 03:55:44.191 [0x7fcfbfd11700] DEBUG - Mapped object 20601bf7-4e3e-4ce1-b23a-bf2a6e733604_480x320 to part 0 on server
Mar 30, 2020 03:55:44.192 [0x7fcfbfd11700] DEBUG - OnBrowseDirectChildren returning success with 5 objects of 5 total
Mar 30, 2020 03:55:44.699 [0x7fcfd0e31700] DEBUG - GET for
Mar 30, 2020 03:55:44.707 [0x7fcfd0e31700] DEBUG - Mapped client to generic profile: Host: 192.168.1.179:32469; Connection: close; icy-metadata: 1; Range: bytes=539319234-; Referer: ; Cookie: ; User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Web0S; Linux/SmartTV) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2125.122 Safari/537.36 WebAppManager
Mar 30, 2020 03:55:44.746 [0x7fcfd0e31700] DEBUG - Mapped object 73b5189f927a7278952e to /library/metadata/190 part 0 on server
Mar 30, 2020 03:55:44.746 [0x7fcfd0e31700] DEBUG - Downloading document http://127.0.0.1:32400/library/metadata/190
Mar 30, 2020 03:55:44.756 [0x7fcfd0e31700] DEBUG - HTTP requesting GET
Mar 30, 2020 03:55:44.846 [0x7fcfd0e31700] DEBUG - HTTP 200 response from GET
Mar 30, 2020 03:55:44.847 [0x7fcfd0e31700] DEBUG - Caching document as 7db13464267ab84ec192c16145e1f1c98df24ed7
Mar 30, 2020 03:55:44.873 [0x7fcfd0e31700] DEBUG - Serving up item /library/metadata/190 part 0
Mar 30, 2020 03:55:44.873 [0x7fcfd0e31700] DEBUG - MDE: received PLEX_PROTOCOL_ANY from client, but could not determine best protocol. Defaulting to HTTP
Mar 30, 2020 03:55:44.873 [0x7fcfd0e31700] DEBUG - MDE: analyzing media item 507
Mar 30, 2020 03:55:44.873 [0x7fcfd0e31700] DEBUG - MDE: E27 - It’s On! The Special Operation to Bring Down Kaido!: Direct Playing due to no transcode profile
Mar 30, 2020 03:55:44.873 [0x7fcfd0e31700] DEBUG - MDE: E27 - It’s On! The Special Operation to Bring Down Kaido!: Direct Play is disabled
Mar 30, 2020 03:55:44.873 [0x7fcfd0e31700] DEBUG - MDE: E27 - It’s On! The Special Operation to Bring Down Kaido!: no direct play video profile exists for http/mkv/h264
Mar 30, 2020 03:55:44.873 [0x7fcfd0e31700] DEBUG - MDE: E27 - It’s On! The Special Operation to Bring Down Kaido!: no direct play video profile exists for http/mkv/h264/aac
Mar 30, 2020 03:55:44.874 [0x7fcfd0e31700] DEBUG - It’s On! The Special Operation to Bring Down Kaido! - video.width limitation applies: 1920 > 320
Mar 30, 2020 03:55:44.874 [0x7fcfd0e31700] DEBUG - MDE: E27 - It’s On! The Special Operation to Bring Down Kaido!: selected subtitle cannot be converted to a compatible format, burning into video stream
Mar 30, 2020 03:55:44.874 [0x7fcfd0e31700] DEBUG - MDE: E27 - It’s On! The Special Operation to Bring Down Kaido!: selected media 0 / 507

2

Are the subs still maintaining their original formatting, or are they just plain text when you use DLNA? Plex is going to transcode to maintain font/position/effects.

3

I assume it’s not maintaining any formatting since I can set the code page/sync/position/size/color within the builtin DLNA app. The real-time transcode is pointless though, because synology can’t keep up without buffering and/or bad stuttering. If this is the case, I’d prefer an option for “Prefer subtitle downgrade over real-time transcoding” or something along those lines.

4

Not to editorialize this, but it sounds like you picked the wrong server/client combination for your needs. Possible options:

  • Get a more powerful server.
  • Change to another client that can handle the subs or strip the formatting.
  • Export the subs into a plain-text format and use that sub track on the LG client.

A device that can use the Plex Media Player app would be able to render the subs correctly. You can also run Kodi with the Plex add-on using compatible devices, and it will playback the subs natively. The Amazon Fire TV apps have the feature to set transcoding for only image-based subs (the result being ASS gets played back with formatting stripped).

I can’t say I recommend trying to run Kodi on a Firestick. I get mixed results due to lack of accelerated video support for all codecs out there – even on a Fire Stick 4K.

So, this isn’t really a bug. It’s a feature request.

5

As a workaround, you can use Subtitle Edit, https://www.nikse.dk/, to export subtitles into SRT format. Save the file with appropriate name & language code (ex: Avatar (2009).eng.srt) and choose it instead of the ASS subtitles.

Note that with the Plex SmartTV app, if the audio is transcoding, enabling any subtitle results in video transcoding as well.

https://support.plex.tv/articles/categories/your-media/using-subtitles/

6

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