It’s been known for a long time that Plex Roku app doesn’t support soft subtitles in non-latin languages and have to force subtitle burning for all video streaming because the current Roku OS isn’t shipped with any Unicode fonts to display glyphs of these languages. Less known is that Roku at least has a capability to support them once necessary font files are packaged with each individual app as evidenced by YouTube app which has no problem displaying many non-latin languages.
I request Plex to have its Roku app bundled with some Unicode fonts to natively support subtitles in non-latin languages. Our Roku forum has a long list of posts asking this specific feature for the past few years, but seems no feature request has been officially posted here yet.
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/263210/chapter-not-displaying-unicode-character-i-e-chinese
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/243314/hebrew-album-and-artist-names-are-not-displayed
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/222400/non-latin-characters-in-plex-roku
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/209308/incorrect-cyrillic-fonts-in-roku-player
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/208293/unable-to-display-korean-text
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/184718/is-there-a-chance-to-have-unicode-support
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/182646/how-can-i-see-non-english-text
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/179321/media-with-arabic-letters-show-up-as-squares
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/179173/unicode-dbcs-support
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/165042/preview-app-cant-display-japanese-characters
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/155555/unicode-support
Despite some technical concerns expressed in the past, I’d say this is a good time to revisit them since we now have good source of Unicode fonts like Google Noto to fit our needs. There should be also less concern to leave legacy devices with limited storage than what used to be 3-4 years ago.
Please feel free to add your support / concern / etc.
