SOLVED: Subtitle Issues

[podonnell]

That said, I went back to the file that only had PGS subs, and it appears to be the same. Isn't this jobs intent to create SRT subs for all files?

As the name implies, subtitle extract only pulls put the subs from the video container. It won't convert them to another sub type (not that I'm aware of anyway).

Ah, what would that help with then? Instead of processing them during runtime?
My issue here was the PGS sub type was converting my video from HDR to SDR. I'm looking for a solution for that. Supposedly SRT subs don't do this because they aren't burned in?

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If the client doesn't support the subtitle format it will burn them in, which requires transcoding.  If you don't have tone mapping enabled this will result in a washed out picture.

Actually just came across the 'Enable Tone-mapping' setting, which I have off.

I'm guessing this would only prevent the washed out colors, but still remove HDR. Any other benefit?
All of my devices support HDR, so I don't think I'd have a need for this. My goal, for this particular issue, is to find a way to display subtitles without removing HDR.

[Efficient_Good_5784]

Ah, what would that help with then? Instead of processing them during runtime?
My issue here was the PGS sub type was converting my video from HDR to SDR. I'm looking for a solution for that. Supposedly SRT subs don't do this because they aren't burned in?

There's actually a useful description of this in Jellyfin's playback settings for "Allow subtitle extraction on the fly":

Embedded subtitles can be extracted from videos and delivered to clients in plain text, in order to help prevent video transcoding. On some systems, this can take a long time and cause video playback to stall during the extraction process. Disable this to have embedded subtitles burned in with video transcoding when they are not natively supported by the client device.

I'm going to asume that you don't know about what's the difference between subtitle file types.

PGS subs are image-based subs. That means that the subfile is basically pictures of text being displayed on a screen.

On the other hand, SRT are text-based subs. The client can read it and apply its own styling to it since text subs are editable like that.

SRT subs are widley supported, so chances are a client can overlay them on the video player instead of needing a server to burn-in the subs directly onto the video.

However, just because subtitles are text-based doesn't mean that they're more widely supported. Another popular sub format are ASS/SSA subs (mainly for anime). ASS subs are also text-based, but these are way less portable than SRT subs due to being written in a more complex way, and needing clients to have support for them implemented.

There exists tools that convert image-based subs (PGS, VobSub, etc.) to text-based (like to SRT) using a process named "OCR" (Optical Character Recognition). This is generally resource intensive and may require human intervention to correct some mistakes the tool made during the conversion.

The easiest thing would be to obtain media with SRT subs from the start. However, most DVD/Blu-ray discs only come with VobSub or PGS subs. I believe there should be a Jellyfin plugin that has community-made SRT subs for most popular movies or shows.