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 43229]

Thanks for sharing.

[RanmaCanada 591]

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". 

[RanmaCanada 591]

3 hours ago, cnieuweboer said:

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". 

Extremely unpopular opinion, but upgrade your potato hardware. God. We've been dealing with this for decades now with fansubs and their fancy karaoke, and this is 100% a "you/we" problem in the fact that you/we the user made the choice to watch something with so much fancy scripting and fonts that it made the device we're watching it on gasp for breath and ask for mercy. I got sick and tired of my media devices not being able to render fancy subs and just decided to build media pc's for the areas where I watch my anime. This is not and has never been an Emby problem, this is a content problem. Even the Nvidia Shield falls to its knees on this content.

If you want to blame someone, blame the media companies for making such weak devices for media playback, not Emby, or blame yourself for wanting to watch something that is so god dang awesome. This is sadly not the solution, it's just a band aid. We need far stronger media devices, or a means to make subtitle handling multi-threaded, as it's currently single thread only. FYI you'll run into the same problem if your device doesn't support PGS subs, as they are image based.

[cnieuweboer 3]

1 hour ago, RanmaCanada said:

Extremely unpopular opinion, but upgrade your potato hardware. God. We've been dealing with this for decades now with fansubs and their fancy karaoke, and this is 100% a "you/we" problem in the fact that you/we the user made the choice to watch something with so much fancy scripting and fonts that it made the device we're watching it on gasp for breath and ask for mercy. I got sick and tired of my media devices not being able to render fancy subs and just decided to build media pc's for the areas where I watch my anime. This is not and has never been an Emby problem, this is a content problem. Even the Nvidia Shield falls to its knees on this content.

If you want to blame someone, blame the media companies for making such weak devices for media playback, not Emby, or blame yourself for wanting to watch something that is so god dang awesome. This is sadly not the solution, it's just a band aid. We need far stronger media devices, or a means to make subtitle handling multi-threaded, as it's currently single thread only. FYI you'll run into the same problem if your device doesn't support PGS subs, as they are image based.

I didn't make this thread (or the scripts) to "blame someone".