Synchronous display of subtitles from .ass files not working

I’ve got a 3d movie with an .ass file for subtitles. Looking at the file, I can see that there are two entries for each subtitle. Each entry has the same time stamp, but a different screen position. Thus, at the given time, the subtitle should show on the left and right (sbs) or upper and lower (ou) part of the screen.

When I use vlc, the subtitles are showing as expected. However, when I use Plex (i’ve tried with PS4, ROKU, and web client) whichever position is listed first in the file shows up on screen about 1 second before the next listed. I’ve tested changing the order that the lines are entered in the .ass and can see that the display delay follows. The subs clear from the screen at the same time, as expected.

Has anybody else experienced this and is there anything I can do to fix it? It makes the subs very annoying once merged into a 3d image as only one eye sees them for the first second, until the PLEX server catches up and shows them both.

Hey there. I was curious if you found a solution to this? Yesterday was my first time using .ass file and noticed the same issue. Thanks!

Plex does not support directly playing ass subtitles. They get converted to basic text subtitles and lose a lot of their formatting. If you want to preserve the special formatting, you need to tell PMS to burn the subtitle in.

Even with burned subtitles, .ass files are not rendered correctly. For exemple , for a 3D file, the left and right side subtitles don’t appear simultaneously.

We don’t support subtitles with 3D videos. We don’t do anything special for 3D video. It’s just treated as having a very high aspect ratio. So if you choose to burn in subtitles, it just renders it in the middle like it does for regular videos.