Serviio

zip - a query on transcoding and subtitles: I have been testing a number of scenarios in which I have enabled burned-in subtitles set. When set (and a video has a valid subtitle file) it appears that transcoding always occurs, even if:

• the profile doesn't contain transcoding instructions for that type of video; or
• the Generic DLNA profile is selected; or
• Transcoding is disabled.

Is this correct - that subtitles have precedence over the transcoding settings? This is very confusing - I would have thought disabling transcoding should have had precedence over the subtitle setting (ie. turning Transcoding off should disable burning-in of subtitles as this requires transcoding).

The confusion gets worse in that the Generic DLNA profile contains instructions stating that burned-in subs are required for all containers. I believe this then gets inherited to all other profiles - so if they don't have a specific hard-subs section in that profile, all formats are transcoded (if they have a subtitle file).

Would it be better if:

• The <HardSubs> was removed from the Generic profile. This would mean that by default the "Only when required" setting would not transcode for any file types - the individual profiles would need have these filters if required. Setting the requiredFor to all containers is superfluous imho anyway - its the same as setting it to "Always" in the console. This would allow hard subs to be applied to one device (only when required) without having to worry about it impacting other devices (as is the case now).
• Perhaps removing the <HardSubsTranscoding> section from the Generic profile (however I can see how this may be required for those devices that don't require transcoding but also do not support soft subtitles, although for those few cases a separate profile would still be better rather than everything inheriting this).
• I think the Transcoding setting (enabled/disabled) should have precedence over the subtitles setting...?

Your thoughts?

That is correct.

The reason why Generic profile has hardsubs transcoding on is that most devices don't support external subs, so i want to give new users the experience with subtitles out of the box.
Obviously if they uncheck burned in subtitles, there will be no transcoding.

I think when i use external subtitles , not all the subs are shown in the movie... i think it skips some lines ??
Can i change something so that all the subs are displayed..

Might be due to the character encoding of the file. make sure it's UTF-8 or set the file's encoding in the console.

When i change the settings in the console to ANSI i get NO subtitles ...

It should be one of these encodings: https://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/

I hope someone can help, I'm ready to tear my hair out

I have an 8 episode foreign show in mp4 with srt subtitles. All Episodes and subtitles works fine in VLC, but I can't get the subtitles on episodes 1 - 7 to play over Serviio to either my Vizio TV or my SONY N-100 media player. Episode 8 and subtitles play just fine. After some fiddling, I found this:

Episode 8's srt media info:
General
Complete name [filepath]S02E08.srt
Format : SubRip
File size : 24.7 KiB

Text
Format : SubRip
Compression mode : Lossless

While all the rest of the files have only this in their media info:
General
Complete name [filepath] S02E01.srt
File size : 56.9 KiB


Note the format is missing from the header from the SRT in eps 1 -7 I cannot find any way of editing this. Any ideas?

Have you tried the srtWiz tool from the wiki: http://wiki.serviio.org/doku.php?id=srtwiz

I have a another problem with subtitles: I have some MKV files with multiple subtitles tracks with multiple languages (for example English CC and English forced, Italian CC and Italian forced and so on). I want to configure Serviio to embed subs into video but only transcode forced subtitles. I set Embedded subtitles to always and wrote "ita" in the preferred languages box, but when I play the file on my Samsung D series TV I get English forced subs embedded into video instead of Italian one. This happened on a file in which the first subtitle track was the forced Italian one. Even if Serviio would ignore my setting it should use the first track.
Also it's a big problem to make tests on my TV because when transcoding is on I can't skip to a certain point of the video and forced subtitles are not closed captions that are displayed every time someone speaks.
Also I have some MKV files in which the Italian audio track is not the first one, is it possible to select the preferred audio track?

I have the same problem with MKV files.
No matter what i select in the servo console none of the subtitles are shown.

Seems like nobody can help us here...

thailand... I've had the same problem. The way I fixed it was to specify ENG in the preferred language under delivery/subtitles. I hope this helps

On the PS3 Media Server it is possible to choose between 1.4, 1.6 and 1.8 in the size of the legend, and the color of it. I would do the same in Serviio. This configuration option is available? SA and will not this next update Serviio? It would be very useful for people who are away from tv and has vision problems in addition to old people.