I really don’t understand why the iOS or Android apps can’t support ass subtitles directly, without transcode to srt. All my video files can direct play, but the server app still need to transcode only because I use ass subtitles. So I can’t use nas as a server because of its low performance cpu. This is really disappointing.
All the other players are support ass subtitles such as Infuse, nPlayer… So… Why Plex can’t…???
iOS API does not allow formatted subtitles like ASS so if Plex plays subtitles as a separate stream which makes video direct stream possible, then you would lose subtitle formats. On the other hand, if you want to keep the formatting of ASS subtitles, Plex has to transcode subtitle into the video. Whether to transcode the subtitle or stream it without its format is configured by the client not the server.
As you can see the Burn Subtitles option on the iOS client under the Advanced page, there is an “Only Image Formats” option. If you set your client to that, then all ASS subtitles will be streamed separately and the videos won’t need transcoding, but you will lose the formats of the ASS subtitles.
Thank you.
But if, as you say “iOS API does not allow formatted subtitles like ASS”, why Infuse and nPlayer can?
@Pumbaac said:
Thank you.
But if, as you say “iOS API does not allow formatted subtitles like ASS”, why Infuse and nPlayer can?
Not sure about nPlayer but Infuse doesn’t. It simply transcodes ASS to WebVTT (the format iOS API supports which is pretty much the same as SRT in terms of functionality) then stream it to iOS which loses the layout information of the ASS subtitle, which is exactly the same method in Plex if you set Burn Subtitles to image only.
[EDIT] Hmm… it seems they implemented native ASS support in the latest version of Infuse. That means that they are not using native iOS API as Plex does, but uses their own in-house subtitle engine instead. This is fine for Infuse I think as they only need to deal with iOS but for Plex, if they are going to support streaming ASS directly, they will have to implement the subtitle engine in every one of their clients on different platforms. I highly doubt they would want to open that can of worms. Subtitle supporting has always been buggy for Plex even using the native iOS engine, which is supposed to be stable…
