Simplify ass/ssa subtitles.

[cnieuweboer 3]

I've had some issues with ass/ssa subtitles overloading my tv cpu. In particular some karaoke timing in anime subtitles have thousands of subtitle changes for just an opening song. And recently I've watched an anime show that had all sorts of complicated vector drawings in its subtitles (stat boxes in a litrpg), causing massive stutters. Batch converting ass to srt is pretty easy, but that also loses the nice static formatting that isn't causing issues.

So I (Sol/Astra LLM) made some scripts to try improve that. Text is made static, while still keeping as much of its formatting as possible. On the high end, some if the subtitles (files when extracted) went from 14MB to 40kB. This complete fixed any karaoke stutter.

There is also a "partial" mode that attempts to keep some of the vector drawings, but still simplifies those as much as possible. Vector drawings still cause some small stutters on my tv, but nothing major. But I don't have enough shows with vector drawings in its subtitles to fully test that.

https://github.com/cnieuweboer/Simplify-ass-subtitles

[Luke 43227]

Thanks for sharing.

[RanmaCanada 590]

On 27/09/2026 at 17:27, cnieuweboer said:

I've had some issues with ass/ssa subtitles overloading my tv cpu. In particular some karaoke timing in anime subtitles have thousands of subtitle changes for just an opening song. And recently I've watched an anime show that had all sorts of complicated vector drawings in its subtitles (stat boxes in a litrpg), causing massive stutters. Batch converting ass to srt is pretty easy, but that also loses the nice static formatting that isn't causing issues.

So I (Sol/Astra LLM) made some scripts to try improve that. Text is made static, while still keeping as much of its formatting as possible. On the high end, some if the subtitles (files when extracted) went from 14MB to 40kB. This complete fixed any karaoke stutter.

There is also a "partial" mode that attempts to keep some of the vector drawings, but still simplifies those as much as possible. Vector drawings still cause some small stutters on my tv, but nothing major. But I don't have enough shows with vector drawings in its subtitles to fully test that.

https://github.com/cnieuweboer/Simplify-ass-subtitles

Is there no longer the option to burn in subtitles for potato devices?

 

[cnieuweboer 3]

On 10/3/2026 at 12:29 AM, RanmaCanada said:

Is there no longer the option to burn in subtitles for potato devices?

 

That isn't always a good fix. Emby can run on a very lowpower server/NAS, as long as it doesn't need to transcode. And Emby supports a "hardcode when subtitles aren't supported". I don't think there is a good way to automate "hardcode subtitles when the tv CPU struggles with certain effects".