Tl/Dr: Which subtitle formats does Roku’s custom subtitle option support?
Hi, I’m using the 3.0.1 Roku client, server version 10.10.1 on MacOS 10.13. I’m watching a series with Chinese srt subtitles and enabled fallback fonts, directed them to a folder full of necessary woff2 and otf fonts as well as enabled custom subtitles on the client. But the srts either display squares or just nothing at all. Works fine if I switch to the ass file I exported though. Does the CJK support only apply to ass/ssa files or is there something I’m doing wrong?
Couple of things to note.
The Roku has very little file space. Ensure your fonts are as small as possible!
Also, Jellyfin will only grab the 1st font returned by the API. Even if you have a folder full of fonts, whatever is listed first is what it’s going to grab - even if it’s a font file format that Roku can’t use.
I suggest using the otf format. It’s what I have and confirm it works with custom subs.
Due to these limitations, my suggestion is to only have 1 otf font file that is less than 5mb in the fallback font folder.
If you don’t mind, how or where did you get an otf that small? Did you cut out characters?
Straight off the noto font repo: https://github.com/notofonts/noto-cjk/tree/main/Sans#region-specific-subset-otfs
Okay so I tried the smallest of these (HK Thin @ almost exactly 5MB) plus a lot of smaller otfs I found elsewhere , one at a time, and while playing they all show nothing - I checked the logs just in case and I’m seeing a lot of [ERR] [30] - “MediaBrowser.MediaEncoding.Subtitles.SubtitleEditParser: 57 errors encountered while parsing ‘“srt”’ subtitle using the SubRip format parser” , with errors like: “Line # - Error reading time code”
does that mean at this point it’s not showing because the srt needs fixing?
Yeah, the server is logging that it can’t parse the SRT file. Sounds like it has issues that need to be resolved before it can send the subtitle text over to the Roku client.
Update: so apparently I’ve been using internal srt all this time 😅 but I tried it with external and this time it still didn’t work, but no errors in log. Will keep trying other fonts just in case
EDIT: Checked playback info and it mentioned the dimensions and level of the subtitle were all 0. Does that mean anything?
My suggestion would be to post this in the troubleshooting forum. The troubleshooting team is amazing at helping finding resolutions to things like this. Much better than I, that’s for sure😆, I’m just a programmer.
