Subtitles way too small

General Discussions
1

So this is weird: when I play videos through the web based player on my computer, the subtitles are way too tiny:

[Album] Imgur

When I play videos in the Samsung TV’s Plex client though all subtitles are normal.

Any idea what’s going on?

1 Like
2

I’ve noticed the same, but for me it happens through the Plex player as well. It only happens to some videos, and AFAIK it’s only been happening recently. If I change the subtitle font to “huge” in the player settings, it becomes bigger, but not nearly as big as it should be (and videos that the subtitle work correctly on, it’s way too big).

3

Please post the Plex XML info of a video where this is happening.

If possible, please post also a full screen shot of the web app.
From the above screen shot I cannot see important info, for instance at which size the web app window is being used or possible web browser add-ons interfering etc.

4

Plex Media Player 2.22.1.917-2a5a2e01
Plex Server 1.13.9.5456
Font Size in Plex Media Player settings: Normal

Fullscreen video (subtitle near the table at the bottom): https://i.imgur.com/4iGjTWf.png
XML info of the video: https://0bin.net/paste/Sf6v55FAgBCX6iOk#x8yOQwf7gXZvFVW1-3S9wcGb7Ts71RJIDtlIV5uHpqu

As said, this is not on the web player, but on the proper Plex Media Player. Trying to watch the same video via the web player, I see the same tiny subtitle (regardless of the browser window size, even fullsize).

5

So this is a media type which should pose no problem at all.
MKV with lower-bitrate H.264 video and SRT subtitles

Is there something special about your computer?
What size is the screen? Is it a 4K model?
Which OS platform is it?
What graphics adapter?
Are you using a particularly high dpi value or font size at the OS level?

6

For me it happens on the following players for the video above:

  • Plex Media Player 2.22.1.917-2a5a2e01 on Mac OS 10.13.6 on MBP 2018 13".
  • plex.tv web player via Chrome 70.0.3538.77 on Mac OS 10.13.6 on MBP 2018 13".
  • Latest official Plex App on Apple TV 4th Gen on 46" TV @ 1080p.

I’m away on travel this weekend, but I’m fairly sure I’d see the same on Plex Media Player on my Windows 10 machine as well.

All players use the same server; 1.13.9.5456. Running on Debian Stretch.

7

If you know how, could you extract the SRT subtitle from the MKV, zip it up and attach it here please?

8

I played the same video in VLC 3.0.4 on the same Mac, and the font is tiny there as well, so we can eliminate Plex as the direct culprit.

I extracted the subtitle track: https://0bin.net/paste/0G8MVnOgF9FjHARO#Dvb2xqYFT2Qqm8O4LUTSqWv+KW5oHm66Eb6XsXortyz (only showing the first 4 entries).

Maybe there should be an option within Plex to ignore/override custom font sizes/colours/whatnot in the subtitle files/tracks?

edit: You posted after I started writing this. If you want the whole .srt-file, I can PM it to you if you want.

9

Yeah, the subtitle itself contains a size instruction.

1
00:00:02,702 --> 00:00:05,705
<font color="white" face="monospace" size="1c">
    Sheldon, do you want to put the tables after each section
   </font>

That is a really bad thing to do in general, because you never know on what kind of screen the subtitle is gonna be rendered.

I don’t recall what kind of unit the c is. Whether it is a valid size unit at all or if it is just being misinterpreted as 1px.

There is no valid HTML compatible size unit named c. There is only centimeter cm, zero-width ch or pica pc. So we can safely conclude that this subtitle is simply invalid.

The best way would be to remove the cause of the issue by stripping out all formatting instructions from the subtitle.

10

Yeah, but it would be smoother if one could just let Plex ignore them (-:

11

If even VLC renders them the same (and VLC is usually the player which handles the biggest garbage you can throw at it in the most graceful way), then this is a lot to ask for.

12

That’s just the default behaviour of VLC to respect the formatting within the subtitles. You can easily tell it to ignore the formatting, and use relative sizes (default setting for “Relative font size” is “Auto”, aka respect formatting within subtitles, and if not present, apply some reasonable sizing).

Example using the same video: https://i.imgur.com/Sey6jRw.png

Same should be possible in Plex; you already have a font size setting for the subtitles, and the default behaviour should be to ignore formatting regarding text size within subtitle files, and rather use the setting in Plex (or at least make it an option to do so).

13

I can file that as a request for enhancement.

In the meantime, you could edit the faulty subtitle yourself with Subtitle Edit.
It has a handy search&replace feature which accepts regular expressions as a search pattern.
One of the developers was so kind to give me a regexp which finds the formatting and leaves the text: <[^>]+>

1 Like
14

That would be awesome!

Thanks, but I’m not using Windows for this. A Linux friendly equivalent below if others stumble upon this thread;

mkvextract tracks original.mkv 2:subs.srt
sed -i -E -e '/^\s*$/d' -e 's/<[^>]+>//g' subs.srt
mkvmerge -o fix.mkv --no-subtitles original.mkv --language 0:en subs.srt
rm subs.srt
mv -f fix.mkv original.mkv

These subtitles had an annoying amount of blank lines in them (probably part of the same stupidness as the text formatting), so I’m removing those as well. Should work fine for all kinds of subtitles (as there shouldn’t be any), but if not, you can remove -e '/^\s*$/d' from the sed command above.

15

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