"Unable to load subtitles"

[skribe]

1.  That is the current behavior for the Android TV client.  There is a beta out, but I haven't tried it myself to see if that has changed.

2.  The Android TV client doesn't support some subtitle formats.  This is resolved by burning in the subtitles via transcoding.  If you don't have transcoding working then you will see the message you received.  You can also try the subtitle extraction plugin, which will extract and convert the subtitles to...SRT I believe?  Which Android TV should support without transcoding.  The extracted subs will show up as an ADDITIONAL subtitle track.

This has been a problem every since the inception of jellyfin and I have also seen the complete ignorance of developers to not fix this. Asking to use a plugin to extract srt flies or use transcoding is NOT a fix but a workaround for an issue that has not been fixed for years. My TV supports all subtitles because Plex can play without issues and same work on mpv, vlc. 

When I said there is complete ignorance towards this I mean no disrespect to the community of developers but would like to understand why it has not been fixed for years even after several outcries on the jellyfin subreddit. You will find some even mocking in the Plex forum and subreddit as well.

I have seen jellyfin get better and grow but there is still lower adoption compared to Plex because jellyfin can't get the basic things right like "unable to load subtitles" and no seekbar view like Plex. I have an unraid and I know jellyfin does transcoding better than Plex and has some features like playback speed which Plex will never implement.
But if you head to the Plex forum and subreddit, you will find the one main reason they won't move to jellyfin is because it doesn't work out of the box. By this I mean things like "unable to load subtitles" and a mediocre seekbar. 

I hope the community of developers are reading this and taking the constructive feedback positively. Thank you for all your work jellyfin has only gotten better over the years. I just hope they focus on basic functionality more because there will be more adoption of jellyfin.

Great news! You ARE the community of developers!

Jellyfin is an entirely volunteer driven project. You are the person to whom your post here is addressed. You and anyone else you know that might be able to improve functionality.

Jellyfin is not a product. Plex is not competition. Jellyfin's development is not driven by feature parity with Plex or any other alternative. In my experience, Plex isn't even considered with respect to Jellyfin's development. The opinions of people who prefer various aspects of Plex to Jellyfin aren't even really relevant to the project. They are welcome to use Plex.

In a volunteer driven FOSS project, someone simply needs to be willing and able to pick up a section of code and improve it. And that may take more time and effort on the part of folks like yourself who want to see those changes made. But one thing that will never help are self-righteous rants into the void like this one. There are no employees to hear your complaints. There's no customer service department to make it right for you. It's just you, the project, and the amount of effort you're willing to put into it--or your gratitude for OTHER people who do it for you, completely for free.