Playing ASS subtitles in Roku

[JohnnyM 40]

I just converted my SRT subtitles to ASS format for appearance purposes. I tested them using VLC and they played beautifully. Last night I played a movie on my main system thru a ROKU with ASS subs in it. They didn't play. I switched to SRT subs and everything went fine.

 

Does ROKU support ASS subtitles? If so, what am I doing wrong.?

 

Attaching File structure and Partial ASS file. that I had to add the .txt extension

 

 

Da Vinci Code, The (2006) BluRay.Eng.Forced.ass.txt

Edited September 1, 2019 by JohnnyM

[speechles 1917]

Roku doesn't support Sub Station Alpha. What will happen is the Roku will mung these into SRT. That means anything it doesn't understand in these gets discarded. It might even mean nothing gets rendered and it discards everything. SSA / ASS are experimental on the Roku. The will work if you must but they will not render graphically unless you set your user on the server to do this. You can use the server subtitles settings for your user to enable graphical SSA/AAS rather than letting the Roku mung these. Your media your way.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mung_(computer_term)

Edited September 1, 2019 by speechles

[JohnnyM 40]

Thanks, just what I expected. I couldn't find anything in the forum but I knew you would have the answer.

 

Luckily, I saved the SRT files now to rename them as forced.

 

Thanks again

JohnnyM

[mikeraburn 60]

@@speechles

 

You corrected that ASS problem when I brought it up months ago.

I believe it was in the BETA and not BN as you and EBR were conversing about it in the thread I started.

[speechles 1917]

@@speechles

 

You corrected that ASS problem when I brought it up months ago.

I believe it was in the BETA and not BN as you and EBR were conversing about it in the thread I started.

 

Yes we can direct play them but they munge. The Roku destroys the data used for presentation/formatting of these types of subtitles. It merely keeps the plain text intact. It might not even do that correctly depending on how deeply formatted the text is. The Roku might also refuse to play them correctly. We did add support for these to keep media from transcoding to play these subtitles. But if the intended effect is to display these subtitles in their intended presentation and format then the only way to do that is have the server transcode these as they actually are graphical. This is why we offer both means to display these. Your media, your way.

[considered_harmful 0]

I'm also having a problem with ASS subtitles. In my case, it's failing silently and subtitles aren't being displayed at all. The only way I can force this to happen is by going into the Transcoding settings on the server dashboard and disabling "Allow subtitle extraction on the fly."

 

This is fine, except I would rather have that option enabled normally, and it's a pain to go set/unset this option every time I watch something with ASS subtitles. Is there something I'm missing? If not, could I ask for a feature where the Roku app detects this failure to render ASS subs and then forces transcoding and subtitle burn in?

 

One potentially important thing is that the video is currently transcoding but the reason for transcoding is "Video bit depth not supported," rather than the subtitle format. That could be part of my problem. Here's a bit of info on the file in question:

 

Video

Title 1080p H264
Codec H264
AVC Yes
Profile High 10
Level 50
Resolution 1920x1080
Aspect ratio 16:9
Anamorphic No
Interlaced No
Framerate 23.976
Bitrate 11,676 kbps
Color primaries bt709
Color space bt709
Color transfer bt709
Bit depth 10 bit
Pixel format yuv420p10le
Ref frames 1
NAL 4

 

Audio

Title English FLAC stereo (Default)
Language English
Codec FLAC
Layout stereo
Channels 2 ch
Sample rate 48,000 Hz
Bit depth 16 bit
Default Yes

 

Audio

Title Japanese FLAC stereo
Language Japanese
Codec FLAC
Layout stereo
Channels 2 ch
Sample rate 48,000 Hz
Bit depth 24 bit
Default No

 

Subtitle

Title No linguistic content (Default ASS)
Language No linguistic content
Codec ASS
Default Yes
Forced No
External No

 

Subtitle

Title English (ASS)
Language English
Codec ASS
Default No
Forced No
External No

 

Container mkv

 

 

 

 

Thanks!

Edited October 22, 2019 by considered_harmful

[speechles 1917]

We will eventually have options IN THE APP to handle burning in subtitles that the Roku will mung. It seems this is probably the only way for users to easily control this behavior in the best possible way. I certainly understand the issue. We will be doing something about it in the near future. Thanks for bringing it up that we need to focus attention on this and maybe raise the priority a bit.

 

Here is the ticket for this problem:

Reference: Issue #310: [subtitles] mung/burn-in option

opened on Mar 25 by speechles

[considered_harmful 0]

That would definitely be an improvement.

 

Thanks for the quick response!

[Beebo 4]

On 10/22/2019 at 10:44 AM, speechles said:

We will eventually have options IN THE APP to handle burning in subtitles that the Roku will mung.

...So, is this still a planned feature?

 

 

[Luke 37008]

8 minutes ago, Beebo said:

...So, is this still a planned feature?

 

 

Hi, we've already added an option in the app for this.

[Beebo 4]

Thanks, Luke! And sorry for reanimating the dead corpse of this thread.

I hadn't come across ASS subtitles until just the other day, and didn't realize the option was there in the Roku client. Found it and it works perfectly.

[Luke 37008]

15 hours ago, Beebo said:

Thanks, Luke! And sorry for reanimating the dead corpse of this thread.

I hadn't come across ASS subtitles until just the other day, and didn't realize the option was there in the Roku client. Found it and it works perfectly.

Thanks for the feedback.