[mythtv-users] Please help me with internal player and subtitles

Nicholas Fasano nfasano at mac.com
Fri Jan 15 00:20:58 UTC 2010


On Jan 14, 2010, at 6:20 PM, Nicholas Fasano wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> I have a matroska video file which I have legally obtained that contains a subtitles track that I would love to be able to display using the mythtv internal player.  I have tried every single combination of formats and configurations imaginable, and the internal player just won't display them.  Here's what I've tried:
> 
> 1) muxing text srt subtitles into the matroska file using mkvmerge
> 2) muxing idx/sub subtitles into the matroska file using mkvmerge
> 3) identically named text srt file in my video folder
> 4) identically named idx/sub files in my video folder
> 
> My files don't contain any periods except for the file extension, by the way.  None of these display the subtitles no matter how many times I press "T" or select the subtitles from the mythtv menu.  Muxing the idx/sub files gives me a tantalizing new item in the menu that says "Select Subtitle" as opposed to just the usual "Select VBI CC", but it doesn't display the subtitles.  No error messages are given, but it does say "2010-01-14 18:10:26.200 AFD: Opened codec 0x9f109480, id(DVD_SUBTITLE) type(Subtitle)" with the muxed idx/sub version of the file, which is promising I guess.  My questions are:
> 
> 1) Can the internal player display mkv embedded subs under any circumstances?  (i know there are some threads which say no, but things change and I'm looking for an up-to-date answer)
> 2) If not, can the internal player play embedded subs using any container?
> 3) If not, how can I get the player to play a separate srt file or idx/sub files?
> 
> Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.  And thanks as always to the developers for continuing to make mythtv the best PVR (and much more) out there.
> 
> Nick

Of course, immediately after sending this email, I had my first glimmer of success.  I remembered seeing a preference for text encodings of subtitle files, so I manually went in and saved the srt file using a UTF-8 text encoding.  It then worked, but only when I had "Always display closed captioning or subtitles" checked in the Playback OSD settings.  So it works, but only under one particular circumstance.  I obviously don't keep my subtitles on at all times and find it a bit cumbersome to go into the preferences each time I want to display them, but I guess that's just where we're at right now.  I'm also not a programmer, so unfortunately I can't write a patch.

If anyone knows of some better approach to this, please let me know.  I'm open to transcoding these files and "burning" the subtitles into the picture, but my transcoder of choice is HandBrake and it seems to only burn the sub/idx type of subtitles, and then only under some conditions which I am unable to replicate.    Most likely only when ripping a DVD, basically, which is not what I'm trying to do.  HandBrake just passes-thru the srt type subs, which I'm pretty sure mythtv won't display (see above).

Nick


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