Serviio

Arabic subtitles are not working on this tv, they appear as strange characters, I tried the UTF-8 encoding and unicode as well, all not working.
I opened the srt file using word program and then copied the content in a notepad file then saved it using the unicode encoding and renamed the file to .srt ... the movie is not even showing using this method and it gives an error message of not trying to access the server ..!!

Any help !

Hi mustafacat,

I discovered when I was compiling the Synology NAS version of FFmpeg with libass (for subtitle support) that one of the optional dependencies is a complex text shaping library called Harfbuzz. I asked Zip about it because I had got stuck compiling it and he mentioned that his Mac and Windows compiles of FFmpeg bundled with Serviio do not have this included. I think this is very likely to be required for the rendering of Arabic subtitles by libass.

I can sort of understand why it's not included at the moment. The dependency list for the Harfbuzz library is large, making it much more difficult to compile FFmpeg. In addition to the already long list of required libraries, you also need:
1. ragel: Finite state machine code compiler
2. libglib2.0-dev: Glib Development files
3. libcairo2-dev : Cairo 2D graphics library development files
4. libicu-dev: Development components for International components for Unicode
5. libgraphite2-dev: Development files for libgraphite2
6. libfreetype6-dev: Freetype 2 library development files

However Serviio has users all over the world and I realise that having working subtitles can make a big difference to many people. Next time I compile FFmpeg for Synology I'll investigate getting Harfbuzz built, although I seem to remember one of those components on the above list was causing problems for me (which I was trying before I realised they were optional). Zip may be able to comment further on this.

Dear Patters

Thank you for taking time to write to me.
I really wish if you can find a way to make arabic subtitles work on serviio, cause this will mean a lot to so many people.
looking for ward to hear from zip as well.

Regards ..