Universal Media Server | Forum

I have some MKV files with embedded subs, and to force them to display I modified my subtitle settings to remove the "eng,off;" condition at the start. When I went to play them back on my LG TV, the subtitles appeared but the playback was choppy. Not unwatchably so, but you could tell that it looked like some frames were missing. When I put the subtitles options back to their original format, playback became smooth again (at the cost of embedded subtitles not being rendered any more)

(What's weird is that my Samsung TV elsewhere showed the subtitles for the files, even with the default configuration)

There are many types of subtitles and many different file formats and codecs. The combination of all this decides if the TV can render the subtitles or not (and of course, if UMS' configuration file fore the TV is correct). I sounds like when you "force" the subtitles (it's not necessary to change the configuration, use the "transcoding" subfolder and just select the one you want instead), UMS determines that the TV doesn't support this combination and starts transcoding. If your computer isn't up to the task to transcode the file in question fast enough, you will get "choppy" playback. There are other possibilities of course, but this is the most likely as I see it.