On Subtitles; Plex

I prefer subtitles. I just want subtitles for what is being said by each character. Am I hard of hearing? No. I am Visual though, highly visual and if sound and images don’t clearly separate, text helps me to immediately translate sounds into language. Watching movies and tv like this makes everything that is said understand-able. Watching like this for my own language content. Or foreign content.

I also like watching Japanese or German or French content: English Subtitles, Original Language Audio.

I’m not a fan of dubbed content. Some dubbed is better than others. Overall, one can’t go wrong sticking with Original though. For me, that’s the case, and I’m fine sticking with subtitles on for everything. I get more out of it (and practice reading more 😉 )

How about why this is even better?: My family often makes a lot of noise, blocking out sounds of a show. It’s alright if I read the subtitle…

On my tablet I watch things later at night with the volume low. I can hear it but to understand … give me those subtitles and it’s a golden setup.

I use Plex for most of my watching content that I own. Subtitles for Vobsub content lose the subtitle after awhile.

This is annoying. Many have said “just convert vobsub to srt.” … more work and not worth it for all content, I have done a few, only certain things. It’s OCR and manually fixing errors. Downloading SRT I am not happy with … I’ve deleted everything that Plex downloaded when I had that setup. They can be horrible and I’d rather just stick with what my disc comes with.

The other option is to “Always burn subtitles” and that is then not Direct Playing any content, and my only issue is with  Vobsub DVD rips. Most of my content is Bluray PGS which is not a problem. But transcoding everything is not my desire.

If I had a larger MicroSD card in my tablet I could download more movies which would solve the Vobsub loss problem, for those things. But it’s not really solving the problem. It’s a Plex issue.

So when the subtitles are lost, pausing or stopping the video crashes my Plex Android app. Restarting the app I can Resume and have subtitles for a short time until they disappear again. Initial watching I can get up to 20-something minutes of the video before they are lost.

All in all it’s frustrating, moving to another media program isn’t an option. I love much about Plex and want to use it. 

So one other thing I’ve done is mux the video out of a movie that I know very well, like Return of the King, and play that as an Audio Movie. Well it’s not precisely perfect as .MKA will play in a Music library on Plex, and you have to supply all the media and poster information. I scrobble, so then I have weird things in my profile on last.fm but oh well. It’s nice to just listen to a movie that has good music and is ultra familiar without playing the video it’s less resource hoggy and you can do other things while listening.

.MKA is a great container for movies audio or music albums, but still Plex isn’t as awesome as that … no chapter markers are recognized, and if they were, I’d be happy, and so would others. True gapless playback could be achieved.