I have a number of H265 encoded movies I have ripped from blurays on my 2017 Shield TV (non-pro). When playing on my Samsung RU8000 TV using the Plex App from the TV, shield connected to the network, they are playing fine until I enable subtitles.
The subtitles are PGS ripped from the Bluray. I understand this will cause the video to be transcoded as the subtitles need to be burnt into the video stream. However, even with only 1 movie playing/transcoding, the shield seems too slow - It pauses to buffer playback every 20-30 seconds before continuing on.
This was happening with PMS version 1.25 which seemed to only use software transcoding, but even after updating to experience 9.1 and PMS 1.27 which has re-enabled hardware transcoding, the problem still persists.
Shouldn’t the shield be fast enough to transcode a single stream to a single TV? I can use the workaround of simply searching for an SRT subtitle in the plex player, but shouldn’t I be able to use the PGS subtitles if I wanted to without transcoding issues?
Burning in of subtitles cannot be done with hardware transcoding.
The Shield is a very weak machine, CPU-wise. For it to work at all as a media player, it has a specialized “media engine” chip which performs most tasks in hardware.
While it is perfectly able to play most video formats with subtitles, transcoding them is an entirely different matter. Because it cannot use the identical signal path (and employ the help of those chips which enable media playback).
So if you need subtitles on other clients, you better convert them into a text-based format. Ideally SRT.
Yeah I thought I read something about hardware transcoding not working with subtitles, but I have (hw) next to Transcode on the activity page of the web interface?
Enabling subtitles doesn’t disable the hardware transcoding of the video.
Just the part of burning in the subtitles cannot be performed by the same chippery, so the CPU must do it.
So as a more automatic workaround, is there a way to get plex to automatically download the best matched SRT subtitle, without me having to search for it manually?
