Infuse transcoding workaround

[Jutsch80 14]

Recently Infuse added the option to request transcoded streams from Emby. For me (Ugreen DXP2800 N100 iGPU) it seemed to work very randomly on some files and on some not. The reason to prefer Infuse over native Emby when transcoding is, that Infuse requests an h265 transcode instead of h264. Looking at the logs in Emby revealed that the issue was that the subtitle burn-in request by Infuse failed. 

After some trying and working with ChatGPT on the issue I found a solution. I downloaded the "Diagnostics Options" plugin and found out that when I unticked "Disable Subtitle Filtering", the burn-in request is being processed correctly and a working transcoded stream is sent to Infuse. 

I reason it's just a workaround and not a true solution is that burn-in can lead to unintended results. I've seen files where subtitles were absurdly huge and others where they were not burned in at all. Therefore the only real solution has to come from the Infuse devs to not work with burned in subtitles but rather use HLS/WebVTT subtitles. I will send a report/request to FireCore.

I hope this helps other Infuse users. 

Edited 1 hour ago by Jutsch80

[Jutsch80 14]

Since it's impossible to edit my post (for whatever reason) I can write here that I found another limitation of the workaround. Infuse always seems to request the first subtitle track it finds to be burned in, regardless of which subtitle is chosen, if any. Therefore the user has no choice which subtitle they want to have, or even if they want to see one.