Emby and Anime Content Playback Issues (Discussion)

[solidsnakex37 55]

I wanted to make a post to ask other members of the community how they manage watching Anime content with Emby, on various devices. 

I have issues any time Anime needs to be transcoded and the subtitles need to be burned in. However, I don't have this issue on other platforms such as Jellyfin. It will play the subtitles back perfectly fine. I went on a journey and spent a whole afternoon spinning up 4.8 on a new instance, and while subtitle playback has improved, it's still problematic when subtitles come into play. 

I have made a post about this, but it was my system that was blamed, despite my system not being an issue with a competitor. So I feel just lost in this whole ordeal.

So rather than this be a support post, I wanted to ask if others have issues with Anime content, what they are, and if you're able to get around them? If you can, what do you do? 

Right now, Emby has me in a place that I can't use it exclusively anymore. I will try and watch something on 4.7, subtitles won't show or will be delayed. I switch to 4.8, the subtitles will (sometimes) display and have no issues. If that fails, I just open Jellyfin and watch it, which so far has worked 100% of the time as a last resort fallback.

The response to this is "We extract them from the video on the fly, and in your environment this probably isn't happening quickly enough." but when asked, why is it not a problem on other platforms, this doesn't seem to be a viable question. I will provide logs and transcode logs as an example, but then they don't even get reviewed. 

Anytime I need Emby to step in to help deliver to the content to my device in the form of some sort of transcode, it fails to deliver and I can't watch it. Just feel stuck in what to do to resolve this.

[pwhodges 2012]

I have zero problems with anime subtitles (anime is the greater part of my watching).  I have extraction disabled.  SRT are handled natively by all clients, I think.  ASS are handled in direct play by Windows,  iOS, and Android, and are burnt in at the server for web and Roku clients.

Paul

[keemy 25]

I have no issues playing back  anime depending on the client. Everything direct plays and shows ASS subs correctly on my nvidia shield devices (2019 & 2017) and CCwGTV. I have issues with LG webos though. Sometimes the video profile is not supported and triggers a transcode. I have extraction enabled for the LG specifically as it prevent 4k movies and TV shows from transcoding when displaying subtitles (subrip/PGS). If the video profile doesn't trigger a transcode and direct plays it still sometimes fail to display karaoke signs/songs but I don't use it primarily for anime, more so just to test playback out of curiosity. I'm on the 4.8 beta

[RanmaCanada 496]

What devices are you trying to play them back on where you are having problems?  I've never had issues across multiple platforms be it Roku, Android, iOS or web browser.

[solidsnakex37 55]

1 hour ago, RanmaCanada said:

What devices are you trying to play them back on where you are having problems?  I've never had issues across multiple platforms be it Roku, Android, iOS or web browser.

Do you know if your subtitles are image based ASS? 

I'll say I have no issues when direct playing, but the clients I have issues on are Emby Web (Chrome), Samsung A58, Chromecast, Emby for Samsung. 

My other devices will just direct play, such as the shield and those play fine. But I can replicate my issue anytime I force transcoding on any device. 

[solidsnakex37 55]

5 hours ago, pwhodges said:

I have zero problems with anime subtitles (anime is the greater part of my watching).  I have extraction disabled.  SRT are handled natively by all clients, I think.  ASS are handled in direct play by Windows,  iOS, and Android, and are burnt in at the server for web and Roku clients.

Paul

My issue seems to be any time subs are burned in, but not always. I have tried extration enabled or disabled, and it seems to work 50/50. 

What I've been doing it I pass all my anime through FileFlows (like Tdarr), to extract subs and place a SRT file next to the file. This is what I fall back to if needed, I just wish Emby could do it.

 

What is your server hardware if you dont mind me asking? 

Is your anime playback mostly local without transcoding/burned in subs?

[RanmaCanada 496]

14 hours ago, solidsnakex37 said:

Do you know if your subtitles are image based ASS? 

I'll say I have no issues when direct playing, but the clients I have issues on are Emby Web (Chrome), Samsung A58, Chromecast, Emby for Samsung. 

My other devices will just direct play, such as the shield and those play fine. But I can replicate my issue anytime I force transcoding on any device. 

It doesn't matter if they are PGS or vob.sub or .srt or sub station alpha.  The only problems I have is when the subs are super intricate or overwhelming and the device has a heart attack trying to render said subs on the screen.

Is your server on windows, or linux?  As this sounds like it might be a linux or docker problem.  My server runs on a laptop in windows (i5-1235u).

[pwhodges 2012]

18 hours ago, solidsnakex37 said:

What is your server hardware if you dont mind me asking? 

Is your anime playback mostly local without transcoding/burned in subs?

My server is a 5th gen Intel running Windows 10, with a GT1050ti for transcoding.  About 2/3 of my anime watching is local direct play on an iPad or Windows Theatre, and the rest may be web client, or phone with limited bandwidth (away from home), both of which cause transcoding.

Paul

[solidsnakex37 55]

On 1/28/2024 at 10:52 AM, RanmaCanada said:

It doesn't matter if they are PGS or vob.sub or .srt or sub station alpha.  The only problems I have is when the subs are super intricate or overwhelming and the device has a heart attack trying to render said subs on the screen.

Is your server on windows, or linux?  As this sounds like it might be a linux or docker problem.  My server runs on a laptop in windows (i5-1235u).

If direct playing, I have no issues aside from what you described, where the subs might be heavy image based (like Dr Stone for example) and playback lags frame by frame. 

Though the above isn't much of an issue for me, it's when subs don't render display at all when transcoding/burning them in. 

I am running my Server within the official Emby Docker in Unraid (latest stable). System is 128GB of RAM, 5950X CPU, 1660 Super for HW transcoding. 

I run my appdata on a Samsung 990 Pro m.2 SSD, my media is also cached for 8 days on a Raid0 m.2 cache pool, which should be plenty fast enough. I don't know where in my system would I create a bottleneck for Emby specifically. 

The issue I had was Luke also thought my system was the issue, but no evidence to support it. If I take a file that Emby fails to display subs for, then play that very same file back in Jellyfin with the same subtitle settings and also forcing transcoding, it works perfectly fine. 

The docker mappings for Jellyfin and Emby are the same as well, I don't know what would different between them aside from being different applications. 

 

21 hours ago, pwhodges said:

My server is a 5th gen Intel running Windows 10, with a GT1050ti for transcoding.  About 2/3 of my anime watching is local direct play on an iPad or Windows Theatre, and the rest may be web client, or phone with limited bandwidth (away from home), both of which cause transcoding.

Paul

The only thing I haven't tried, and maybe Emby prefers Intel? Emby doesn't really have system requirements in terms of their preferred hardware, but I wonder if Intel would be better at sub burn in than my current hardware, but I don't really know because other options do it fine. 

[RanmaCanada 496]

I think it might be that ffmpeg does prefer Intel, as I don't believe NVENC can hard sub at all while quicksync can.  Though your 5950x should be MORE THAN powerful enough to handle encoding the subs, it might be confuzzled with doing the hardware encoding of the video and software hard subbing.  I see a lot of old issues and requests for people to have support for burning in subs with NVENC, and even people on Plex complaining that subs lag like crazy when using NVENC to encode (upon further reading, it is more complicated).  Following quote stolen from reddit.

This is something of an interruption of the GPU tasks that are decoding the source file and then encoding the target output. The server moves the decoded frames to the CPU to add the subtitles to the image, then sends it back for encoding. It's a massive slowdown overall to do that compared to keeping the frames all in GPU memory for immediate encoding.

The threading for this is single threaded, so that is a serious issue.  I know this is going to sound stupid, but what I would suggest is to borrow/buy an intel system and see if it resolves your issue.  Yes I know it is 100% ignorant of me to suggest this, and I am sorry.  You would want at least an 8th gen or higher.  Even and N100 SHOULD be fast enough to do this.  Something like this or even this would even do the job (laptops use little power and are easier to pawn off or even justify in buying than a mini system).  Though neither of these have a hardline, you could always try it on wifi, or get a USB NIC (I use one on my laptop server).

I am sorry if this is not the answer you were looking for.

[solidsnakex37 55]

1 hour ago, RanmaCanada said:

Yes I know it is 100% ignorant of me to suggest this, and I am sorry.

I will be honest in saying that I don't find this ignorant whatsoever, in truth this is the first real potential solution that's been offered to me and I appreciate the conversation. 

Overall I have thought about moving from my AMD based system to Intel for various reasons, one being that if I get a Intel CPU with a iGPU, I can access use a monitor to view my unraid server instead of 100% WebUI lol (the little things). 

I will definitely consider it, honestly it wouldn't be too much work to snag a motherboard and CPU and at least test things. If I go this route, I will report back on what I find. 

[pwhodges 2012]

16 hours ago, RanmaCanada said:

I think it might be that ffmpeg does prefer Intel, as I don't believe NVENC can hard sub at all while quicksync can

I'm so not sure about this.  I can switch on the diagnostics option to burn in subs using hardware, and it works (I just once had it fail - perhaps that's why it's still not enabled in the mainstream).  My system is not using quicksync, just NVENC.

Paul

[solidsnakex37 55]

3 minutes ago, pwhodges said:

I can switch on the diagnostics option to burn in subs using hardware

What setting in Diagnostic Options are you referring to?

[pwhodges 2012]

It's expressed the other way round:

"Disable Hardware Subtitle Overlay" - default setting is on, setting to off doesn't survive restart.  I've also used "Force Subtitle Burn-In" to see subs which weren't otherwise shown (in the past - but not for a long time).

Paul

[solidsnakex37 55]

9 minutes ago, pwhodges said:

It's expressed the other way round:

"Disable Hardware Subtitle Overlay" - default setting is on, setting to off doesn't survive restart.  I've also used "Force Subtitle Burn-In" to see subs which weren't otherwise shown (in the past - but not for a long time).

Paul

Thanks Paul! I see that's a 4.8 setting, I will play around with these settings in my test server and see. That force sub burn in might also be a good option to test too, I appreciate your input on this. 

[pwhodges 2012]

4.8 has many improvements in subtitle handling (as, in its turn, did 4.7), even without the diagnostic options.  I hope that the hardware burn-in can be moved to the mainstream in the next beta round.

Paul

[RanmaCanada 496]

8 hours ago, pwhodges said:

I'm so not sure about this.  I can switch on the diagnostics option to burn in subs using hardware, and it works (I just once had it fail - perhaps that's why it's still not enabled in the mainstream).  My system is not using quicksync, just NVENC.

Paul

It's possible Softworkz did some more magic with ffmpeg like they always do.  I know rigaya had to solve this issue as well back in 2020 with their custom build of nvencc64.  Nvidia has hidden the details under a paywall.  The more I look into it, the more problems I find in the past that devs had to create work arounds for to make it work.

All I know is that direct play is the best option.  Even the problems that Emby had with Apple TV in the past and having to create new methods to make subtitles work show just how little mfg's care about those who need subtitles, and the genius devs who fix these extremely horrible short comings.