Universal Media Server | Forum

Re: There is also this option that is set to true
# Whether to use the "sec:CaptionInfoEx" parameter to stream external subtitles.
# Supported subtitles are defined in SupportedExternalSubtitlesFormats.
# Default: false
UseClosedCaption =
This is not in my conf so it may may be related. You could try setting this to false to see if it makes a difference.

Ans: I changed this setting (UseClosedCaption) and no difference.

Re: Another thing you can try is to make sure the srt file is names exactly the same as the video.
For example, if the video is "Movie (2024).mp4" then call the sub file "Movie (2024).srt", this will appear as unknown subtitle to UMS but might work on the TV.

Ans: I changed the subtitle filename to match the video filename exactly, but it still does not work.

Re: If nothing works then I could open an issue on this on Github as I don't have the knowledge to take it any further.

Ans: If you could open an issue on Github, it would be appreciated.

Thank you.
Kurt

In the mean time if you play from the transcode folder to choose the subtitles so they will be burnt in to the video if you need them but will have all the downsides of transcoding like being unable to seek.
You will need to enable the transcode folder in the settings to be able to see it.

That conf is set up to use HLS so this must mean your TV supports this which should get rid of the downsides of transcoding and I think the subtitle selection would work too on the TV.
I don't have any way of testing this as I don't have anything that supports HLS.

Was there a version on UMS which external subtitles worked on this TV?

Re: Was there a version on UMS which external subtitles worked on this TV?

Ans: I thought it worked on v13.x, but am not certain. It's been eight months since I have used this UMS server and TV combination.

Yep. I have the exact same issue: while watching on my TV, most tv series using UMS on windows 11, the .srt files work fine. On some tv series they just don't show.
Though I neither have a problem with those exact same .srt files when playing those problematic tv series .srt files on my computer's media player, nor when playing them on the same TV but then from my NAS media server.
So, there's some mystery to this... the .srt files are working, but just not with UMS.

Troubleshooting this, I suspect I found the cause:
It has to do with the .srt file format.
UMS seems to NOT being able to process the .srt file when it has the unix file format. The .srt files are only processed well, when they have the dos format.
When you convert the .srt from the unix format to the dos format, i.e. from \LF to \LF\CR line endings, the subtitles work fine.

Since UMS does not seem to support the unix file format .srt files on windows, at least not at the moment of writing this, you would need to convert the .srt files from unix to dos format.
Manual conversion of the .srt files in batch recursively for your video library can be a bit of a head scratch, since there is not an obvious, simple solution available, unfortunately.

The best solution would be for UMS to support unix style .srt file formats.
But that probably will take some time to hit release and will not help you today.

Notepad does open the unix format .srt files and correctly shows them (yes, this is possible since about about 2018). You can see the format of the file in notepad's bottom bar.
But... notepad cannot help you save the file in dos format, unfortunately.
Notepad++, however, can. But then you need to do it file by file, not in batch (AFAIK).

On internet you can find some haphazard cmd and/or powerscript solutions. I did not try them all. Most of them have some drawbacks deleting and/or replacing some characters in the conversion. Check e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/175 ... ne-endings.

There is an open source tool called UNIX2DOS, found here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/unix2dos/.
If you decide you want to convert all your .srt files to dos format in your video library folder tree, you'll still require a cmd file script to carry out unix2dos on the tree, though.

This could potentially be the problem but in the case where UMS is streaming the video it does not need to read the srt file, it just offers this as a resource for the device to use so it will be that which is unable to read the Unix encoding.

If UMS was transcoding and the subtitles were not showing assuming everything else is correct then it could be UMS (more specifically FFmpeg) to blame for not reading the Unix encoding.

There could be some other problem with this if the resource link is incorrect then the device will not be able to find the file, or the TV is expecting some header or other data.
The way Samsung does this is different than other renderers as it needs the CaptionInfo.sec header to find the sub file.

There is also a CharMap option in the renderer conf that should be able to convert things like \LF to \LF\CR but I think this only applies to transcoded video. One thing that I could do to test on my old Samsung TV is if I had the exact same video I could see if it plays correctly and will eliminate this as a possibility and confirm it is an issue on the actual TV.

@binary512 could you upload a video and the srt file somewhere so I can do tests on the same video.
You could use something like Mega to upload to, might be best to PM me with the link though.
As the video has to be streamed and my TV has limited support for codecs make sure the video is MP4 and is using h264.
I think the video you played in the logs [A Christmas Story (1983).mp4] should work.

@Fairway could you do some logs of the videos where this is not working so I can see if it is the same issue or something else. See the section in red above.

@Fairway Thank you for your suggestion about the SRT files being in Unix vs. Windows format. I used Notepad++ to change the format and then tried both formats again. Unfortunately, the same result - the Samsung TV does not display either Unix or Windows format SRT files, nor does it show up to select the file.

@mik_s I have sent you a PM with the files (MP4 and SRT) to test. Thank you for your assistance.

Kurt

Thanks.

I tested it and it just works immediately so this definitely confirms it is a problem with newer Samsung TVs.

I got the proper subs from OpenSubtitles and even tried converting then to UNIX (LF) EOL encoding in Notepad++, confirming by showing the special characters, and it still worked.
Each time I was able to select the subs on the TV and they display as expected.

I made an issue here asking if anyone with a modern Samsung TV could confirm this and see what is wrong.

Just saw someone else report that external subtitles are not working for them but were in 14.6.0 so maybe you can confirm this by trying that version.

I just tried v14.60 with external subtitles and it works fine. So something broke with Samsung TVs and external subtitles with version 14.70 (and 14.80 also).

Ok, here's my experience with this problem, in case it could help. I have an old Samsung TV (maybe 7-8 years old, I can't remeber exactly) and external subtitles worked perfectly with version 13.8.0 that I used until a few days ago. Then I decided to update the software to the latest version and the external subtitles stopped working, well not all, some worked and some didn't, now having read this thread I undestand it depends on the subs file format, but many didn't work. So here's what I did:

- Installed the last version 14.8.0: external subs don't work.
- Installed version 14.6.0 (as mentioned on this thread): external subs don't work.
- Installed version 14.0.0 and I got the empty TV folder bug (I read about the bug on the changelog after downloading and installing it).
- Installed version 14.1.0: external subs don't work.
- Installed version 13.10.1: external substitles finally working again!

So I can confirm (at least in my case) that the problem started with changes from version 13 to 14, I guess it's the best place to start looking for the solution.

Saludos