Picture the scene, i just downloaded the The Monkey King 3D, all 8.5 GBs of 1080p awesomeness. I started it playing, hit the 3D button on the TV, put on my glasses and turned up the 5.1 to divorce threatening levels. It was playing silky smooth and sounding fantastic
Then the narrator started talking and I realised the subtitles were off, no problem I thought and I switched them on (the file actually had 3 different options for English subs) the screen went black for a sec while it recombobulated itself with the subs only when it started playing again it was pausing every couple of seconds. I turned the subs off, silky smooth, back on, stuttering into unwatchable frustration.
As I mentioned there were 3 options for subs English PGS English VOBSUBS and another English PGS. They all did the same thing!
Is this a known bug? Is there a fix? Are you all judging me for being really excited to watch The Monkey King 3d?
Playstation is one of many Plex clients that can’t handle bitmap subtitles, like VOB or PGS. So what happens is the server has to transcode the file, even if it’s video the client can normally handle. If you have a slow server (like an NAS box), it’ll stutter. Even if you have a fast server, it’ll lose quality. You can try using the Media Optimizer, but you’ll have to wait longer to watch it.
It’s very frustrating, I already ripped my giant anime collection years ago, don’t feel like doing it again while picking a language for shows I haven’t even seen yet.
I don’t fully understand the issues involved, apparently the client can draw arbitrary graphics with transparencies, and the server knows how to read the subtitles… maybe the client doesn’t know exactly what frame the video is on? Whatever it is, the last I heard it didn’t sound like this was going to be fixed any time soon.
we are working on adding soft subtitles (not having the server burn them in) to Playstation, I’ve started looking at them this week and still need to do more testing to see if they are feasible or not (We’ve been burned many times by these devices where you think something will work until a bug in the platform throws a wrench and ruins the party).
One thing I can promise you is that I’ll keep you updated.
When you say you’re working on soft subtitles for Playstation, are you talking about text subs, like SRT? I know that’s on the roadmap for similar platforms. What would be huge news to me is bitmap subtitle support.
Earth to Plex, am I missing something, but subtitles is a BIG DEAL and MUST WORK NOW, kinda priority. Ask anyone with hearing issues, Why…
Some movies frankly just need them on.
I have the same issue : Blu-ray ripped in .MKV (so PGS subtitles inside), Plex Server on a Synology DS2413 (yes, I know, it’s too slow for live-transcoding, and a Playstation 4 Pro with the Plex client.
Has anyone a trick or a workaround to display PGS subtitles on the PS4 without having to transcode files for burned-in subtitles (and without having to extract and process the PGS through an OCR to get SRT) ?
@“kay.one” Any news on the text subtitles/SRT soft subtitles in PS4? I tried to use the Plex Cloud feature, but it can’t handle single transcoding of a 720p video well enough - buffering every few seconds, so the only way to have Plex Cloud useful for me is to have native soft subtitles support in the PS4 client. I know that PS4 media player is capable of handling SRT just fine, so I really want to know if the feature is coming to PS4 Plex at all.
