ASS File Progress & Question about Custom Subs

[ServerNoob005 2]

Been almost a year since the last time I touched Emby, but I thought I would give it a visit to see what progress has been made since last year. Last time I was in these forums, a Roku Ultra could seemingly not play any ASS files without major issue. It would either never load or play for 3 seconds, maybe screen tear, and then go back to buffering. Turns out now it can play them quite well! Don't know when it happened, but thanks a lot devs, that is a hell of an improvement. I don't have a lot of anime, but it works fine for Hyouka, A Place Further than Universe, & Yuru Camp Season 2 + Specials from a quick test (load up in a few seconds, 33%, 75%, 99% and play).

I have a question though: "What influences an ASS file to load quickly or not in Emby"? 

Yuru Camp Season 1 runs fine once loaded but loads terribly (takes over a minute to start a single episode). HOWEVER, unlike any other anime file I have, this is case where I downloaded custom subs from a github, because I only have the JP blurays which did not come with sub files. Think it was from this github which produces some highly detailed subs. I don't really expect you to download these, but I am curious if there is something to be learned here. What might be causing the issue? Is there potentially a flag issue? Or is it literally just a sub size issue? Are there any settings I can tweak etc. Hate to say the classic "Plex doesn't have this issue" but it does not. Subsequently, that's why I'm curious what Emby is doing that is potentially causing it/if there is anything I can test. I guess let me know if you want the logs (will try to get them), but I didn't know if there was really a point to doing so in this case.

[Luke 42593]

Quote

I have a question though: "What influences an ASS file to load quickly or not in Emby"?

Hi, is it internal or external?

[ServerNoob005 2]

10 minutes ago, Luke said:

Hi, is it internal or external?

If I understand your question correctly: internal.

Make mkv was used to extract MKVs from the blurays and then remuxed with external downloaded sub files from github via mkvtoolnix. In other words, each episode is a single file. There are no cases where I use external unmuxed sub files on my server.

Edited May 21 by ServerNoob005
clarity

[ebr 16449]

The Roku player only has rudimentary support for SSA subs.  If they are not too complex, it can show them without all the decorations and animations.  To get the full effect you need to turn on the option in the app to use the server to burn them in.

[ServerNoob005 2]

Hello ebr, I am aware and I already have burn-in enabled. I think your response does indirectly answer part of my question.

Emby’s ASS/SSA burn-in pipeline has likely improved substantially since last year, because previously a Roku Ultra could barely handle any ASS files at all, whereas now most of my test cases load within a few seconds and play correctly. The issue then is likely out of my hands and more related to Emby’s rendering pipeline used for Roku burn-in.

Both Emby and Plex appear to burn-in ASS on Roku, yet Plex initializes these same files much faster. I was curious what specifically influences startup time for certain ASS files, since it's specifically the externally downloaded and muxed fan subs that seem to cause an issue for me. I was mainly just curious if there was something to be derived from this case and hence brought it to your attention. Essentially: What is Emby doing under the hood, so to speak, within its pipeline with these specific ASS files that is causing it to take ages to load?

Likewise, it is easy to notice that Emby for Roku seems to have a scaling issue in this case. In the attached comparison images, Emby renders noticeably larger text on roku (overflowing off the book page, larger book blurb, larger bottom subtitles) than plex. Though to be fair, subtitle scaling already seems to vary across devices and clients in general, so perhaps it doesn't tell us much at all.

So, I suppose all I can really do is wait for further improvement of the burn-in pipeline. As I said, it's a big leap over last time, but seems to still need work. Regardless of Roku's limitations, I think both Emby and Plex have already proven ASS subtitles can be done on a Roku. In Emby's case it's just a matter of speeding up the process. Perhaps I should download and try the custom S2 subs files and mux it to see if the issue is reproducible once again and or/compare the file sizes between the default sub files and the custom S2 ones.

Edited May 21 by ServerNoob005

[Luke 42593]

HI, we'll be updating the server's embedded ffmpeg build in the near future so there's a chance that will help with this.