Serviio

I have a strange problem with subtitles. Although the preferred language for subtitles is set to 'en' in the Serviio Console, the subtitles are actually served in an apparently random variety of languages – most commonly Polish, but also Romanian, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Estonian, Dutch, French and probably a few others – but never English! This is so annoying that I have had to turn off online subtitles. However, there are times when it would be useful to have them, e.g. when I am watching with a friend who has impaired hearing.

What could be causing this? What can I do to troubleshoot it?

Most of my videos are downloaded from BBC iPlayer, ITV and Channel 4. I am streaming them from Serviio on my Windows PC to my Samsung TV (model UE32H5500). The TV normally has subtitles turned off by default, but this seems to be overridden when it receives a stream from Serviio containing subtitles. I am sure that the problem is with Serviio rather than with the TV.

Thanks for your help,
Phil Gardner

can you post detailed log of trying to add a new file and playing it with subtitles on?

Yes, but there's a huge amount of extraneous material in the log files. I thought Serviio was up to date in scanning my media files, but apparently not. I stopped the Serviio service, deleted the log files, and then restarted the service. I then immediately added a random episode of 'Mrs Brown's Boys', which I had previously downloaded from BBC iPlayer, by moving it into a folder that Serviio monitors. Very soon I saw it added to the database. I then played it on my TV, but found there were no subtitles (I later found from the logs that Serviio couldn't find any on opensubtitles.org). I then played an episode of 'Humans' that I had previously recorded from Channel 4 (UK), and the subtitles appeared in Dutch. Finally I stopped the Serviio service again.

I am attaching the six log files zipped up as logfiles.zip. I hope that if you search for the series titles ( 'Mrs Brown's Boys' and 'Humans' ) you will be able to find enough relevant information to give you a clue as to what is happening.

try to use "eng" as the language code. Or add it to your list of languages.

In 1.10 it'll be be a bit tighter, so you'd get no results rather than Dutch.

Thank you. I tried changing the subtitles language code to 'eng' as you suggested, and got no subtitles at all on any videos. I then tried 'eng, en, english' as suggested by the placeholder in the language code field, but again got no subtitles. I have double-checked that my credentials for opensubtitles.org are correct.

This is all rather baffling! Do you have any further suggestions? Should I try adding and then playing another new file, this time checking first that opensubtitles do have English subtitles for it?

btw, subtitles will be only found, if the video has IMDB id associated, ie you have Descriptive metadata on and the item is found on the online metadata database. The detailed log should confirm if subtitle was found or not.

Yes, I do have 'Online metadata sources' selected under Descriptive metadata. As most of my videos are TV programmes, I use TheTVDB and FileBot for naming the files. I only use IMDB for movies; I include the IMDB id in the filename of movies but not otherwise. Will this cause a problem with finding subtitles?

it tries to find them by file hash (ie someone has exactly the same file as you - unlikely in the case of recored shows) and by IMDB id (which is present for most items on thetvdb.com and themoviedb.org).

It will not try to find them by file name, as it would be too inconsistent, in my opinion.

Ah, I see. If it doesn't try to find the shows by filename, does that mean that adding the IMDB id to the filename won't help?

it'd help, but you'd still have to turn on Online metadata sources or have imdb id in your XBMC files (and have that on),