Subtitles on the xbox client

[dragowolf]

So I recently started using Jellyfin. I'm pretty new to almost everything local streaming and hosting, almost always used to use streaming sites before, so forgive me for the dumb questions.

I use jellyfin on my xbox one x. I noticed that some videos show subtitles normally, without any issue, while others seem to be having issues loading subtitles. By issues, I mean that sometimes random subtitles appear for a few seconds spread across a video, and sometimes no subtitles appear at all. This happens with the same video too, the same video sometimes shows these erratic subtitles and sometimes doesn't.

The videos are all mkv files.

When trying to stream the same videos on my laptop through jellyfin, there seems to be no issues whatsoever

Any help resolving this would be appreciated, I thought it was a simple case of subtitle offset but that doesn't seem to be it either.

[Efficient_Good_5784]

If by laptop, you mean you're using the Jellyfin Media Player client, that would make sense because it uses MPV as a video player. MPV has really good support for a variety of subtitle formats.

What's most likely happening on your xbox is you are playing a file with some subtitle format that is incompatible with the client.

[dragowolf]

Oh, do you know if there's any solution to this?

[TheDreadPirate]

The only workaround I know of is to burn in all subtitles when watching on the Xbox. If a client tells Jellyfin it is able to directly play subtitles, Jellyfin will simply send it the subtitle track and we rely on the device's subtitle renderer. If their renderer is bugged/sucks, there isn't much we can do except burn in subs.