I’m running PMS on Nvidia Shield Pro which operates as both a server and a player. Most of my media is directly playable but I have a few things that require transcoding for various reasons (unsupported codes mostly, i.e. AV1 and other such things).
For a while now I notice that when transcoding happens subtitles (in almost all cases those are external SRT files) are not showing up. I’m pretty sure in the past I’ve seen subs load just fine and even though I can’t be 100% sure I believe some of these exact media files have been subbed previously.
Everything is named and organized properly. I doubt this matters but I also have Plex Pass.
What could be wrong and is there something I can do to make the transcoding work properly?
PMS version is 1.40.4.8679 (smb)
Plex version is 10.19.2.1191
Shield is on 9.1.0 (33.2.0.125)
Can you manually pick the subs or do they not show up at all? SRT subs almost never transcode unless you are asking it to burn in subs by default (it’s the most supported subtitle file so usually no need to transcode it).
If you can manually pick the subs and they just aren’t automatically loading for you then it’s likely the file naming and maybe your language settings on your account that are outta whack.
To pick up subtitles automatically, they have to be named the right way. Particularly external ones. If Plex doesn’t know what language it’s in for example it can’t use the “automatically pick a subtitle” feature.
So, for example, if you have Police Story.mkv and Police Story.srt and that srt contains French subtitles, Plex has no idea they are french subtitles even if you have your language settings for French. The srt file needs to be Police Story.fr.srt in order for Plex to know “martinzonev needs these french subs I’ve found here to understand what’s goin’ on”.
That’s the usual reason external subs don’t load automatically anyways.
If that’s not it, you might try running a video where it’s not working and then upload the logs and that’ll give folks a bit more info to help track it down. Maybe the media info of the video too. (how to grab logs is here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/226836308-help/)
Thanks for your suggestions but, as I said earlier, everything is named perfectly and that is absolutely not the reason for this. Subtitles show as loaded when I open the playback window, they just aren’t showing up when the shield plex player is playing the transcoded version (other external devices that can handle the AV1 video load everything just fine).
I’ll see how I can fetch those logs and share them here.
EDIT: Attached is a zip with logs from just now playing the movie Contact which has external SRT subs that don’t display during transcoding (they work just fine on my phone that can direct play the AV1/Opus encoded content).
Hmm, i cant help by log, but i download a AV1 File and try a selfmade srt.
Here it play the video and show the subtitle with Plex for Windows at PC, the files be on Shield USB HDD.
Playing Video on Shield it is not working, because the Shield Server doesn’t have the power for transcode.
I’m extremely reluctant to believe this is a subtitle issue as the exact same subtitle works just fine when the video isn’t being transcoded (I downloaded another version for the sake of testing and everything is just fine during direct play). Also, it’s not just this particular combination of video + subtitles. Nothing that is transcoding shows subtitles.
Right. That’s why it transcodes it instead of direct playing it. And when it does, subtitles that are there, are correctly named and would show otherwise, do not.
I’m afraid one of us is maybe not understanding what the other one is talking about. Maybe it’s me but just to make sure I’m being clear - this isn’t about not being able to direct play AV1, I’m aware of this and I know it will be transcoded.
My issue is that subtitles aren’t showing up when any sort of content is being transcoded for no apparent reason. The AV1 stuff was just an example of something I know gets transcoded but I have the same issue with pretty much anything I’ve had that doesn’t direct play.
So, does the subtitle show as enabled when you start playing the file? I’m curious to know if Plex seems to indicate it SHOULD be there, but somehow fails to actually burn in the subtitle when converting.
Yes, it shows as loaded. I have the ability to reconfigure offset, size or whatever the usual options are. In some cases I have multiple subtitles for the same file that are getting detected and show in the selection list during playback. I’m able to switch them around but they still won’t show up.
Ok, but you wrote, you are running PMS on Nvidia Shield Pro which operates as both a server and a player.
But my Nvidia Shield TV Pro 2019 can’t transcode AV1, regardless of whether there are subtitles or not. A message appears saying the server is not powerful enough to convert videos.
So if i want to transcode AV1 with or without subtitle, I need another server, one that can transcode AV1 and is strong enough.
Really? Ha! That’s super interesting because it does mostly work for me outside of the subtitles not showing up. That log I shared earlier is from an AV1 1080p movie with OPUS audio that does play (usually for me both AV1 and Opus, together or on their own, trigger transcoding). The solution for the Opus stuff so far has been to just play through Kodi which direct plays it. To be honest, I’m not sure if I leave the movie running for a while it won’t start buffering every once in a while but it does play.
Nonetheless, what you say is very intriguing and when I get home in a couple of hours I’ll give another try to the 2-3 AV1 files I still haven’t replaced and see if any of them refuses to play. I’ll keep you posted.
I’m surprised that AV1 is not supported by the Nvidia Shield for playback, there must not have a in-time decoder for the android player. If it can decode AV1, then the server component has the ability to read it. I’m now glad I’ve been avoiding AV1 generally lately, as I was unsure of my player’s compatibility.
Have you noticed if this happens only with AV1 files transcoding? If you have a non-AV1 file, do you notice subtitles or are they missing as well? If we can determine if it is ALL file types, or a quirk related to the AV1 codec of the original file, we can try to narrow down what might be the cause.
But so far from your description, this sounds like it is very much a bug in the Nvidia Shield Server component, and I think a dev/mod should investigate.
