Best way to direct play media with PGS Subtitles on Android Tv

[wolfrumble4398]

Hello friends,

I've been using Jellyfin Android TV on my Tivo Stream 4k and was wondering what are some people's workarounds to play files with PGS Subtitles in Direct Play? Right now, I am using MPV as an external player but it's kinda janky, meaning that my parents will have a hard time using that method.

For example on MPV,

- There is no resume timestamp on Jellyfin itself, so if I watch something halfway and switch to a different device (e.g. phone) I will not be able to pick up where I left off.

- When I press back while media is playing, it will open up the media in MPV again instead of going back to Jellyfin. If I press back again here, it will restart Jellyfin so I have to search for the media again. It is even worse when playing TV Shows as now sometimes pressing back takes me to the next episode (sometimes it just keeps going to the next episode in a seemingly random number of times)

Fortunately, most of the files with PGS are Anime. These problems are either the same or worse with VLC. I hope that this is enough information for people to understand the issue I am facing. If not, please ask me for more.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you!

Jellyfin-androidtv: v0.16.10
mpv-android: v2024-04-09 Build

[TheDreadPirate]

Exoplayer is provided by Android. Without transcoding support on the server side, you have to jump through hoops for client side support, as you've found out.

The best option is to have a server capable of transcoding, IMO.

[wolfrumble4398]

Exoplayer is provided by Android.  Without transcoding support on the server side, you have to jump through hoops for client side support, as you've found out.

The best option is to have a server capable of transcoding, IMO.

Oh I see. I don't know if you're part of the team developing the Android-Tv client but do you happen to know why they did not decide to use MPV as their player just like the Desktop Client or even Findroid, which from my understanding, uses MPV and Exoplayer?

[TheDreadPirate]

MPV is a very versatile player, but it will attempt to software decode a lot of videos.  Depending on the performance of the device is running on that may be fine.  But on low performance devices, they may not have the power to CPU decode a video.  Which is why Jellyfin relies on exoplayer due to it only doing hardware accelerated decoding.  This is why Findroid defaults to exo and makes clear that MPV is experimental.