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+--- Thread: Subtitles work if file is on my ssd, but they don't work from a external hard drive (/t-subtitles-work-if-file-is-on-my-ssd-but-they-don-t-work-from-a-external-hard-drive)
Subtitles work if file is on my ssd, but they don't work from a external hard drive - track no.1 - 2025-08-08
Title of the post, i'm having this weird issue where subtitles display perfectly on client devices (fire stick 4k and android app) if i run my media from my server's ssd (with my server being an old laptop that has both a quicksync capable igpu and nvenc via the nvidia gpu) and i can't seem to understand why, like, i'm at a complete loss as to why subtitles don't work from the external hard drive but do from the ssd despite using the exact same files
RE: Subtitles work if file is on my ssd, but they don't work from a external hard drive - bitmap - 2025-08-08
Can you recreate the issue and provide some logs? In a lot of cases, embedded subtitles present issues. They must be extracted to a file prior to being displayed -- that is, if they're even compatible in that way. In other words, your movie starts playing and Jellyfin tries to strip out the subtitles in the background while the media is still playing. It has to run through the entire file to get these.
You might see where I'm going -- there's a possibility that the SSD's performance allows this to happen much more quickly than the HDD. I don't have a ton of issues, but I use the subtitle extractor plugin.