Subtitles (again): work with MKV but not MP4

[robert_foster 0]

Hi there,

 

I've got an issue with subtitles (sorry if you get fed up with those :-P). So here is the thing: I'm testing my DLNA setup with 3 iOS apps (VLC, nPlayer and the MediaBrowser client) :

 

- VLC don't show any subtitles, so well, we'll not talk about it (it seems to be a VLC issue)

- nPlayer and MB Client both show subtitles with MKV files, but not MP4 (I've only tested with those two formats, don't think I've got anything else in stock)

 

When playing an MP4 video with nPlayer (with subtitles) the log give me a lot of this:

[subrip @ 0x811826f20] Invalid UTF-8 in decoded subtitles text; maybe missing -sub_charenc option
[Parsed_subtitles_1 @ 0x8118326a0] Error decoding: Invalid data found when processing input (ignored)

I don't get any relevant log with MB client (or did I miss them ? there's so much to read ^^).

 

Anyway, I did create a profile for MB client to force transcoding MP4 with SRT subtitles (I'm new to that, I may have done something wrong), but it did not transcode the file (direct play). nPlayer oddly seem to transcode without a profile (yes, since there's a transcode log for this MP4 video, see above, and I did not create a profile for it, the log even tell me that the default profile is used), but fail at playing the subtitles.

 

So I'm stuck here, since I get two widely different results with two different apps, and I'm not too familiar with all those profiles and DLNA stuffs (why did they make this standard so hard to setup ???).

 

I can try to give more informations as needed, but right now those are the only relevant stuffs I can think of.

 

What I'd really like to achieve is a generic profile that would work with any app and play subtitles (+ without the need of transcoding (which eat a lot of resources from my server) if possible). I understand that I have to tinker with the profiles, but I really don't understand how to fill some informations (i.e: how to put a wildcard for all apps for instance), and yet I spent 3 hours this morning trying to figure it out, filling and testing... I also wonder why the default profile does not include subtitles by default ??

 

Well, I hope someone can help me set this right.

[Luke 37022]

When a profile doesn't contain an entry for subtitles it means the device has no special way of handling them and they'll be burned in. We'll need more info. Please see http://mediabrowser.tv/community/index.php?/topic/790-how-to-report-a-problem/