So I’ve been trying to use Jellyfin for a long, LONG time now, and I’ve never really been able to use it remotely reliable.

I can go on for a long time about all the problems I’ve faced, lets just say that after years I can still not use it to watch something with the family because there is always something not working, I could start about hardware decoding having worked for a while and then suddenly without explanation no longer working, but lets start with subtitles…

I just want to have subtitles actually load without having to sacrifice a goat to whatever god is out there to have subtitles work. What is the problem that subtitles just 99% of the time don’t work?

Worse, sometimes they work while watching a show, and a jellyfin update comes by and, you guessed it, subtitles no longer work for that show, even though they work for some other movies, sometimes…

I am a software engineer, I do loads of devops, I can find my way around, but jellyfin is just… I dunno what to do anymore. Is there a reliable alternative, perhaps, that actually just works?

I’ve long given up on the dream that I could have something similar to netflix for all my movies and shows that aren’t on netflix, where I can scrub with images, for example, I just want to be able to watch a show with the family with subtitles without fiddling for 30 minutes to try and get it to work.

Current setup is google-tv with 0.17.9 client, and the latest docker server. Shows seem to have okay subtitles on web client, but on google-tv, every time I select a subtitle, I get a “subtitles loading” message, and then 10-20 seconds later a “failed to load subtitles” message.

Anyone?

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      0·
      19 days ago

      Can’t wait for the 0.18 client to be here, should (and better will) fix a lot

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      0·
      19 days ago

      Well either this fixes it or I’ll have to switch to a different client. If that won’t fix it, I’ll have to drop jellyfin altogether because at this point Jellyfin is little more than a web viewer on my computer (the only place where subtitles work semi reliable) and for that I can just use VLC anyway.

    • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      0·
      20 days ago

      It fixes PGS and SRT subtitles. For stuff with ASS format subtitles, they’ll still need to be burned in for now.

      A couple community contributors wanted to look into adding LibASS support to the client but it’s non-trivial since LibASS is written in C and the AndroidTV client is in Java/Kotlin, so it’ll need to use either JNI or a transpiler to make it work.