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Hebrew Subtitles: Request to correct the location of punctuation marks


AlderaaN

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adihecht

Until this gets fixed, thought I'd share my method for getting the hebrew subtitles displayed correctly, including punctuation on the Samsung TV app:

It's a bit exhausting to do that for every subtitle srt file, but here it works:

1. Start with the hebrew .srt file you obtained for your movie or tv show: somemovie.srt.

2. Use a subtitle program such as "subtitle workshop" to convert your .srt to .ssa (sub-station alpha file).

Note: you should use Arial as the default font. Also, when you save to .ssa, you can play around with the style of the subtitles, and use larger font, change the outline color and thickness etc to your liking. 

3. Key step: after saving your file to .ssa format, rename your file to .heb.ssa suffix, so your subtitles file will be named like this: somemovie.heb.ssa

This last part is crucial, because:

a. without the .heb.ssa suffix , the letters "ל" and "ך" will appear much larger than the rest of the text. Don't know why. it's just the way this is.

b. with the ".heb.ssa", emby will also recognize that this subtitle file contains Hebrew subtitles, so the emby subtitles menu will show the subtitle language as Hebrew and not  as "undetermined".

Hope this helps someone,

and hope this gets fixed soon so we can continue to use .srt files without having to convert them.

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  • 4 weeks later...
SamES

Sorry, not yet.  It's on my list.  I should get to it soon.  

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  • 5 months later...
adihecht

The Hebrew subtitles issue was fixed... for a few months.

But today I re-installed the emby tizen app for the Samsung TV (I need to re-install it every month)... and it was broken again. New Tizen up shows version 1.1.0.4.

Punctuation marks appear on the right again... Also the entire subtitles position (for english or hebrew subtitles) seems to have changed and it is now much higher up on the screen, covering the video frame... which is annoying. 

 

 

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SamES

The change in height is due to the standardisation of subtitle rendering across the apps.  Others have requested an option to make the height user adjustable which may come in the future.

I noticed the change in Hebrew subs as well.  I actually don't know how this came to be fixed previously as I'm not aware of any changes to resolve this (do you know roughly what version or month it may have been fixed previously)?

I think the real issue here is that when I look at the sub files, they have been created with the punctuation on the left (which is not technically the correct thing to do), then the system is detecting that this is a right-to-left language and switching it around.  I expect the (incorrect) authoring of the srt file is to resolve this on devices that cannot correctly handle RTL languages, but then it causes an issue on devices that can.

So for example, this is how the webvtt specification describes how the subs files should be authored. (from: WebVTT: The Web Video Text Tracks Format (w3.org)) with all the punctuation on the right.  Where in your case it is on the left which now causes a problem when we try and render these correctly.  Your file is not unique by the way, I have seen many examples of this in my testing.133439036-af182290-8bed-4b58-a790-b60fd0

The issue here is that I expect over time we will see examples of files authored correctly and incorrectly so we need to find a better way to manage this.

Edited by SamES
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adihecht

SamES, thanks for  replying.

1. I think the issue got fixed around June 2021. and with version 1.1.0.4 punctuation in hebrew is wrong again.

2. As for the height of the subtitles: previously subtitles were displayed at the bottom of the screen - which was great. in most movies, the subtitles would show inside the the lower black bar and not on the image; for TV shows, the subtitles would show at the bottom of the screen which did not interfere with the video itself.

But now I understand you tried some standardization across apps - but the result for Tizen TVs is horrible. The subtitles appear almost in the middle of the video image; and when there are 2 lines of text in the subtitle (which is most of the time) - then there is an unproportionally large empty space between the first and second line. This causes the subtitles to take an even larger space over the video image and is very distracting.

As for wrong authoring of the SRT files, I don't think that's true.

1) we are talking about hundreds of .SRT files for many authors... Are they all wrong?

2) All other players handle the punctuation correctly: kodi, mpc-hc, and even samsung tv itself if I play the files from USB.

3) The hebrew text in the example you included (I don't know what webvvt is) is in itself reversed letter-by-letter, so that might be why in that format the punctuation would be "on the right". The truth is for a text editor like notepad, a test/srt file does not specify that a punctutation mark is "on the right". Its simply a matter of the punctuation mark character coming AFTER the last letter in the order of bytes in the file - and the editor program decides if it is displayed "on the right" or "on the left".

What I'm trying to say is that if I open the SRT file in notepad, it most certainly does not look like in your example. In your example, the hebrew letters are completely reversed:

שלום!

appears as:

םולש!

attaching an example of how the SRT looks like when i open it in a text editor:

image.png.532f9c626b81c154d49c44f03d85c54c.png

I really wish the Samsung Tizen subtitle rendering would return to the way it was up until recently.

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SamES
49 minutes ago, adihecht said:

The subtitles appear almost in the middle of the video image; and when there are 2 lines of text in the subtitle (which is most of the time) - then there is an unproportionally large empty space between the first and second line. This causes the subtitles to take an even larger space over the video image and is very distracting.

Can you please provide a photo showing the position?  They may be higher than previous but shouldn't be as high as you describe.

Thanks for the information on the subtitles and the punctuation.  Your input is definitely important, I'm happy to be wrong as I don't know Hebrew but can only go on what I've observed, the documents I can find and feedback from people like yourself.  I will check back previous versions and see if I can determine why this changed.  Technically this recent change should have fixed the issue (as it was 6 months ago) but something has happened in between so I need to find out what that was.  We will find a solution.

 

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adihecht

Thanks SamES.

Attaching here photos of where subtitles are positioned with current version 1.1.04. Note the large gap between subtitles lines along with the higher position - makes it hard to read and distracting. In my opinion, the previous position was much better.

And of course the issue of punctuation in hebrew subs...

I noticed that:

Some TV show files (apple TV shows) typically have embedded SRT streams in the MKV container file - as ripped. the punctuation on those is rendered correctly on the TV. Extracting the SRT stream to a file, shows that these SRT streams are punctuated the same as other SRT hebrew files. And indeed, if the SRT is not embedded in the MKV, the punctuation is reversed. If it is embedded in the SRT, the punctuation is correct.

 

 

20211008_130300.thumb.jpg.696219ffe7bf6cb00da962e825eef4c6.jpg

20211008_130300.thumb.jpg.696219ffe7bf6cb00da962e825eef4c6.jpg20211008_130437.thumb.jpg.999800d0abcbe9a80978396a552393d2.jpg

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SamES

Yeah, that's where I expected them.  I agree that they should be lower (that's why I had them that way previously) but quite a few people preferred them higher so that the subs were in the same area as the picture rather than focusing on the black bar area.  Now the code is aligned between the clients, hence the change, but it is a personal preference thing so I expect at some stage there needs to be an option to adjust the position as desired.

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adihecht

Ok, if people have different tastes then probably this needs to be a preference setting.

As for the punctuation issues, I hope you resolve them soon.

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 10/8/2021 at 9:01 AM, adihecht said:

Ok, if people have different tastes then probably this needs to be a preference setting.

As for the punctuation issues, I hope you resolve them soon.

HI, how does the latest update to the tizen app compare for you? Thanks.

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adihecht

Installed the latest update.

I don't notice anything different with hebrew subtitles, the punctuation is still in the wrong place for SRT files. Was the latest version supposed to fix the Hebrew punctuation, or make some changes to the placement of subtitles?

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  • 4 weeks later...
adihecht

Thought I'd add another point to consider regarding this issue:

If the SRT subtitles are muxed into the mkv file - there seems to be no issue with the punctuation marks being on the wrong side. But if the SRT subtitles are kept external to mkv file - then the punctuation marks are on the wrong side.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...
SamES
On 08/10/2021 at 08:53, adihecht said:

The Hebrew subtitles issue was fixed... for a few months.

But today I re-installed the emby tizen app for the Samsung TV (I need to re-install it every month)... and it was broken again. New Tizen up shows version 1.1.0.4.

Punctuation marks appear on the right again... Also the entire subtitles position (for english or hebrew subtitles) seems to have changed and it is now much higher up on the screen, covering the video frame... which is annoying. 

 

 

@adihechtcan you please try the latest USB release (released in the last few days), this should be resolved now.  Thanks

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avishai0528

Hey,

 

Just installed it for the first time on QNAP, playing on my Shield TV Pro with latest Emby version from Play Store.

Punctuation shown in the wrong position :(

 

Any information you may need (versions, logs, pictures, srt files...) that might help solving this issue don't hesitate to request from me.

 

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adihecht

@SamES

Tested version 1.2.4 of the Samsung Tizen app today. Punctuation for Hebrew SRT subtitles is shown correctly. So this issue is finally fixed, great work!

Now, if only there was a way to control the vertical positioning, because current position is quite bad (for most movies, the subtitles appear half inside the movie frame and half in the black bars.

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SamES
3 hours ago, adihecht said:

Tested version 1.2.4 of the Samsung Tizen app today. Punctuation for Hebrew SRT subtitles is shown correctly. So this issue is finally fixed, great work!

Thanks, but it has possibly caused an issue on another platform.😖

3 hours ago, adihecht said:

Now, if only there was a way to control the vertical positioning, because current position is quite bad (for most movies, the subtitles appear half inside the movie frame and half in the black bars.

This will probably come at some stage, but it would be a common setting across a few platforms, so it will need some work to make sure it deals with all scenarios

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  • 4 months later...
SereneLoner

Does it have a fix yet? I also have the same problem when playing on Nvidia Shield pro 2019 but not on my smartphone.

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12 hours ago, SereneLoner said:

Does it have a fix yet? I also have the same problem when playing on Nvidia Shield pro 2019 but not on my smartphone.

HI there, can you try sideloading our standard android app on the same device and let us know how that compares?

https://emby.media/emby-for-android.html

Thanks !

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SereneLoner
19 hours ago, Luke said:

HI there, can you try sideloading our standard android app on the same device and let us know how that compares?

https://emby.media/emby-for-android.html

Thanks !

Hey, thank you for your reply.

I installed the standard android app on my shield and the subtitles great, just like when I watch on my smartphone, although it shows irrelevant dots like that (not a big deal): 

So can you fix the issue so it'll show it like that using the TV app?

Thank you.

 

 

Edited by SereneLoner
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2 minutes ago, SereneLoner said:

Hey, thank you for your reply.

I installed the standard android app on my shield and the subtitles great, just like when I watch on my smartphone, although it shows irrelevant dots like that (not a big deal): 

So can you fix the issue so it'll show it using the TV app?

Thank you.

 

 

HI, we'll take a look at it. Thanks.

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  • 2 weeks later...
SereneLoner
On 7/25/2022 at 7:02 PM, Luke said:

HI, we'll take a look at it. Thanks.

Hey, 

Is there a solution yet?

Thanks.

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