Subtitles in recordings/live TV

[rcarballo]

Question: Why do I have to to turn off the hardware decoding in the Pi3 in order to get the subtitles to appear? I disabled hardware decoding but now the Pi's temperature is running close to 80-85. My concerns is in the long-term damage of the unit over an extended period of time.

I ask since I have an OPENELEC RPi3 with hardware decoding enabled. Subtitles (recordings & live TV) work flawlessly. Is this something that I can help you research on my end? Please let me know. Thanks.

/Antonio

[pgbennett]

The reason subtitles do not work is that OpenMAX does not support the type of subtitles that are used in USA TV broadcasts. By turning off OpenMAX you are using ffmpeg to decode the stream. This works with MPEG2 programs but if you have any x264 broadcasts that will not work (Raspberry Pi does not have enough power to software decode x264). I also found that in most cases the subtitles slow down the Raspberry Pi and cause jerkiness, so it seemed that subtitles were a problem in general.

I don't know how OpenELEC manages to do the subtitles in recordings. You could take a recording file and try to play it with omxplayer. If subtitles work there I could look and see how it is done. To find out about omxplayer on the raspberry pi run omxplayer --help.

I am on vacation until January so I cannot do anything on it now.

Peter

[rcarballo]

-enable hardware decoding, reboot, ran the omxplayer but subtitles are MIA.
-disable hardware decoding, reboot, player failed to play video. It just said "Have a nice day!".
-I ran the omxplayer to get info on the video and the CC are there. Tested with VLC on my iMAC to confirm.

command line: omxplayer -p -o hdmi video.mov

-Researched everywhere in regards to how Kodi/OPENELEC does subtitles but could find any information about it.
-Messed around with the video playback settings for "normal" and "slim" but it crashed MythTV Frontend everytime I tried to play a video.

/Antonio