Subtitles no longer follow system-wide settings

[justwondering 10]

Until sometime recently, Emby on TvOS respected the system-wide subtitle settings when playing videos with "soft" .srt subtitles. I'm not sure when it changed, so I don't know if it's the result of an app update or the 4.0 server update, but now subtitles look totally different.

 

I checked the system settings (in Settings > General > Accessibility > Subtitles and Captioning > Style) and they have not changed. I'm using the default setting: small white text in Helvetica over a transparent black background. Other video apps still display subtitles correctly.

 

Emby is now showing subtitles in a huge font using white text with a black outline, with the letters just slightly too close together. It's very distracting and pretty much ruins the experience. Nice handling of the subtitles was the main reason I switched to Emby, so this regression is baffling.

 

Is this a known bug? Or is there a way to tell Emby to respect the system subtitle settings like it used to?

 

Thanks!

[Luke 39686]

Hi, this is part of the cost of having a custom video player that can support more formats. The native apple features don't come along with it and we will have to rebuild this ourselves.

 

We may not be able to match exactly how it was before, but we should be able to make the default size better than it is now.

 

@@corey

[corey 315]

Hey @@justwondering / @@Luke --

 

I'm not aware of any tvOS APIs that would allow us to grab the tvOS system subtitle settings. If I remember correctly the subtitle settings for the new player are pulled from your Emby user settings so you may have an option there to tweak them to your liking.

[Luke 39686]

Right we may not be able to. But we can improve the default sizes we use.

[justwondering 10]

Ah that's very disappointing. Is it possible to re-enable the built-in player?

[Luke 39686]

You'd rather have more transcoding just to support the built-in subtitle settings? Most users do not want that trade-off.

 

We can make the subtitles look much better than they currently do. We can even have our own subtitle settings in the app. We just most likely cannot use the system subtitle settings.

[justwondering 10]

I only put h264 files in my Emby server so (unless I totally misunderstand) there is no transcoding, with or without subtitles. Perhaps that's an unusual use case, but it seems logical to me. I understand the benefits to some users, but it seems ridiculous for every app to have to roll its own video player and subtitle engine.

 

I realize subtitles are probably not a high priority, but when you get around to it some settings would be much appreciated. In particular if you can have a setting to match the Apple TV's default subtitle style (small white non-outlined Helvetica text on a translucent black rectangular background) without having to tweak everything manually, that would be really awesome.

 

I'm always amazed at how fast you guys respond to issues and I'm grateful for all your hard work on Emby!

[Luke 39686]

Thanks for the feedback.

[ebr 15584]

Did you try this?  Does changing the settings in the web app have an effect?

 

 

If I remember correctly the subtitle settings for the new player are pulled from your Emby user settings so you may have an option there to tweak them to your liking.

[Luke 39686]

The web app settings wont' have any impact. Remember we decided to make these per device.

[Senna 368]

While you're at it, with subtitles settings in the Emby Apple TV app, please incorporate a color setting or ad yellow as subtitle color choice, because my household prefers yellow over white.

Thanks !

[reperrier 2]

Hi Folks,

 

Just wondering if there is any resolution forthcoming with regards to the size of the subtitles appearing through the Apple TV Emby app? Trying to watch a film with subtitles that are embedded in the video file itself (via Handbrake) and it appears that the Emby Server is rendering the subtitles so large on the screen - at times nearly taking up the entire screen. I've reviewed my Apple TV settings and read a number of posts in the forum and sounds like this is an issue with the Emby Server itself pushing the subtitles like this to the Apple TV.

 

Photos of how large they are rendering are contained. Appreciate any updates on this - Thanks!

 

[Luke 39686]

HI, we're working on it, thanks for reporting it.

[abat119 10]

I too am having the same issue with subtitles being very large. Mine are external and in .srt format.

 

Thanks for looking into it.

 

On a side note: could there be a possiblity to have a legacy Emby app for the Apple TV? That way people would be able to chose if they want Apple's player or the new MPV based one (at least until the new player gets the kinks ironed out...).

Edited February 25, 2019 by abat119

[sasagr 1]

Hi any news on this topic? any plan to have soon the subtitle style close to the native player?

[Luke 39686]

On 8/9/2021 at 8:43 AM, sasagr said:

Hi any news on this topic? any plan to have soon the subtitle style close to the native player?

We are working on improving it. Thanks for the feedback.

[sasagr 1]

Hi. Sorry to push again but I wanted to know at which stage is the implementation of this feature. I m a beta tester of the tvOS app but I don’t see any change there. At the moment I m converting all the subtitles downloaded at server level to ass format with customized characteristic as I like them. The limit of this is that I cannot convert any subtitle that is already embedded in the video files. 

[Luke 39686]

On 12/3/2021 at 1:54 PM, sasagr said:

The limit of this is that I cannot convert any subtitle that is already embedded in the video files. 

Hi, why do you feel you can't convert subtitles that are embedded?

[sasagr 1]

5 hours ago, Luke said:

Hi, why do you feel you can't convert subtitles that are embedded?

Hi. First of to be clear... when I say embedded subtitles I mean (maybe wrongly) subtitles that are included in the video containers. Basically those that can be extracted using FFMPEG -i ... for example or  MKVToolNix for example.

I have a library mainly of strm files. Today I use the emby plugins to download locally the subtitles (usually srt) and I have a script that will convert to .ass with all the custom characteristics. In this way I have the possibility to use the tvOS emby client with the subtitles displayed like I want them.

But many times the video files have already subtitles in their container (tytpically mkv, mp4) that I can display with the tvOS emby client but their format is standard and cannot be modified either at client or server level afaik. If I m mistaken please tell me how to convert them or change their characteristics (font, colour, background, opacity,..).

The only way I can think of, it is to use again ffmpeg or mkvtoonix but in both cases I will need to download the video file locally in order to extract the subtitle stream (even if ffmpeg allows me to ues urls link as input (remember I dont have local video files but only strm).

I believe that the best option would be to have a the client doing the conversion on the fly and show those subtitles in the font, colour, background,... that I want. This is already happening with the iOS client, but also with Infuse for example. Otherwise this could be done at server level but still on the fly, while the client is playing the video.

Right now my solution is to use Infuse but personally I would like to use a emby client eventually.

Let me know if I missed another solution, maybe even a proper solution

Thanks

[Luke 39686]

Hi, the native player also uses the native Apple OSD, and as a result, it can only show you subtitles that it knows about, whereas the mpv player uses a custom OSD and can present you with everything that Emby supports.

So what we're going to have to do is use our custom OSD with the native player to resolve this. Thanks.

[sasagr 1]

On 1/10/2022 at 6:35 PM, Luke said:

Hi, the native player also uses the native Apple OSD, and as a result, it can only show you subtitles that it knows about, whereas the mpv player uses a custom OSD and can present you with everything that Emby supports.

So what we're going to have to do is use our custom OSD with the native player to resolve this. Thanks.

if you use the native player, instead of the mpv player, I guess we will be back to transcode all the video that are not supported by the native, while the mpv player supports many more formats. I dont think it will be a wise choice.

On the other hand an effort should be made with the mpv player to handle/customize all the subtitles format. This is already happening with Plex and with Infuse that they use the native player at all since a very long time.

The other alternative (probably not desirable) could be to leave the server to do that and basically trascode all the subtitles and present them to the player with the style the user want.