CC (captioning) Live TV/Recordings Android TV/Android

[wmichael3 7]

I know you've wanted people to move from the Android TV to the native Android version of Emby, and I recently gave it another try. The Android version has improved a lot over the years and the best part of it is that content displays more quickly than the Android TV version - it is quite noticeable after one presses the "Play" button.  It seems at general parity with the Android TV version in UI and features.

The one issue that seems to remain is cable (maybe OTA as well?) TV captioning (CC). Android TV handles closed captioning fairly well - both live (via HD Homerun Prime) and recorded. In my most recent look at native Android, I could not get captions to display at all. The option is there to turn them on, but they are not displayed. This is on Google TV.  We often mute the TV sound and use CC.

I also checked a web browser (CC works fine) and Android on a phone (CC does not display)

That seems like the final barrier to moving to native Android.

Thoughts? I searched the forum and could not find where this was addressed recently.

[Luke 39645]

 

Hi there, let's look at an example. Please attach the information requested in how to report a media playback issue. Thanks!

 

[wmichael3 7]

So, are you saying that the native Android app should be displaying CC?

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Edit: I dived into the subtitles settings and saw that Disable Client-Side Decoding was unchecked under EIA-607/EIA-708. (in the UI my CC are labeled EIA-608) I checked the box and gave it another go - 

- Web version is fine, but it restarts the stream which takes a second, and then the CC appears.

- Android version seems to try and restart the stream, which turns black and never recovers - no play. No log file is created for the Android stream - it is Direct Play all the way prior to this attempt.  The Android devices are all Samsung. I went ahead and lowered bandwidth to force transcoding on an Android device and attached that log. The behavior was identical.

I also attached my server log.

embyserver.txt ffmpeg-transcode-b126560a-73c6-4a56-86d0-333396b14f52_1.txt

Edited March 5 by wmichael3
More info

[Luke 39645]

Hi, are you able to update to the latest version of Emby for Android?

[Luke 39645]

Hi, can you please try this build and see how things compare?

Thanks !

[wmichael3 7]

I finally upgraded and yes, the CCs now appear, although the placement does not seem to follow the subtitle settings. It is larger and sometimes is almost centered vertically. Bearable, but not great.

But I did discover another deal breaker with the Android version that works perfectly with the Android TV version: if I pause Live TV, I cannot skip forward through the buffer, which is something we do all the time - pause for 20 minutes, then skip commercials to gradually catch up with real time. I could post a new issue if you'd like.

[Luke 39645]

4 hours ago, wmichael3 said:

I finally upgraded and yes, the CCs now appear, although the placement does not seem to follow the subtitle settings. It is larger and sometimes is almost centered vertically. Bearable, but not great.

 

CC's usually come with positioning info embedded to tell us where to render them. We do not currently have an option to ignore it.

[ebr 15576]

13 hours ago, wmichael3 said:

if I pause Live TV, I cannot skip forward through the buffer, which is something we do all the time - pause for 20 minutes, then skip commercials to gradually catch up with real time

In the standard app, make sure you have the option to transcode/remux mpeg-ts selected.