Looking For a Reliable Media Player

[Old Microbiologist]

I have a largish Samsung Smart TV with Plex on it. I have a Plex server running down in the basement (in my office) with 12 TB of external USB3 hard drives on a cheap Beelink computer. Our network is hardwired Cat5e cabled with 1 gig switches and 7 wifi routers around the property. There is no lag whatsoever and I regularly play 4K video on the TV without problems. It also plays Amazon prime and Netflicks at high resolution.

I have a small ~$30 android based player as a backup should the Samsung become finicky (which has happened several times due to firmware upgrades). That player runs Kodi at 4K fine but generally I only use the TV. SWMBO hasn't a clue how to run any of this so I am appointed media director for our evening viewings.

I also do all the P2P downloads of various stuff as we are in Hungary so many things we enjoyed in the US are simply not available here or can't get english subtitles for. It works out well for us. It is an ongoing game to still get Netflix and Amazon Prime as they are continuously trying to shut down people trying to watch things not authorized outside the US. I personally find that strange as we are paying for it but restricted to only things they want Hungarians to see. So a good VPN service is often necessary and something like a IP address spoofer is also necessary otherwise I get the dreaded "We notice you are traveling and the content you wish to view is unavailable in your area" message meaning they have once again figured out my VPN. So, I have to setup the TV to have its own IP address using a specific spoofer and the Samsung is relatively easy to do that with. Sometimes it is merely resetting it to clear the cache. It is a nuisance and P2P is in some ways easier in the long run and technically not illegal here...yet. Hungary is very slow to adopt EU mandates.

 

[Leo1277]

I wonder if anyone has been able to use subtitles in .srt format over the network. I usually prefer external subtitles, since what comes with DVDs or BRs starts out as an image file and usually first needs text recognition, which works only so-so and leaves lots of errors. Also, often the formatting of subtitles is very poor (too few characters per line from the time of low-resolution tube TVs, too many lines, etc). This applies even to subtitles downloaded from for example opensubtitles.org, so I usually first clean them up with a tool like "Subtitle Edit", which does most of this automatically and quite easily.

The problem is that the DLNA protocol has no provisions for .srt files or other "sideloaded" files, and if anyone wants to offer this support, it has to come through a non-standard way that works both on the DLNA server and the receiver in the end device. I have tried Plex and Serviio (with special profiles for my SONY and LG end devices), but was never successful to send external subtitle files. So I usually use the old, "sneaker network" method of having movies and subtitle files on hard disks that are connected to the USB ports of the BR player or TV, and in that case everything works fine. Is there anybody who has experience with this and got it to work over the network?

 

[Leo1277]

I have used VLC as a media player for many years. But, TBH, PLEX and PlayOn are my usual so really haven't look for an alternative. https://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html

Nevertheless, VLC in addition to being free, has (IMHO) any adjustment to video (and audio) that one could ask for.
...

VLC is indeed quite powerful, but over the last 1-2 years, my favorite player has been "PotPlayer" by the Korean software powerhouse Kakao (which also makes the Kakao Talk IM and phone tool used heavily in Korea). PotPlayer is as powerful and robust as VLC, but in my opinion is more polished and has a much nicer interface.

 

[Fielding]

I wonder if anyone has been able to use subtitles in .srt format over the network... Is there anybody who has experience with this and got it to work over the network?

Yes. Kodi/OpenELEC supports this.

I purchased a German blu-ray thinking it had English subtitles, but it did not. There's a Kodi/OpenELEC plug-in that will use OpenSubtitles.org, and I used it to get subtitles working for this movie.

Hopefully that meets your use case well enough to be relevant.

 

[Leo1277]

Yes. Kodi/OpenELEC supports this.

I purchased a German blu-ray thinking it had English subtitles, but it did not. There's a Kodi/OpenELEC plug-in that will use OpenSubtitles.org, and I used it to get subtitles working for this movie.

Hopefully that meets your use case well enough to be relevant.

Thanks, this is interesting. One thing is that it seems OpenELEC seems to be dead by now, or not further supported, see for example https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/21804-openelec-migration-to-libreelec-info-outdated/ . I just wish DLNA would see an upgrade, or would have done this from the outset - it is conceptually such a simple thing and takes next to no bandwidth, this should just be part of the standard.

 

[The Cosmic Avenger]

Plex can be a pain to get subtitles working, but I have it set up now with OpenSubtitles.org as an "agent" in the Plex configuration. I set it up a few years ago, so you'd probably be best off checking the Plex help files or forums, but I can tell you that all I had to do was create a login at OpenSubtitles.org and enter the login info into Plex. They're not always perfect, but they work most of the time.

 

[Leo1277]

Plex can be a pain to get subtitles working, but I have it set up now with OpenSubtitles.org as an "agent" in the Plex configuration. I set it up a few years ago, so you'd probably be best off checking the Plex help files or forums, but I can tell you that all I had to do was create a login at OpenSubtitles.org and enter the login info into Plex. They're not always perfect, but they work most of the time.

Thanks, this is worth exploring. However, OpenSubtitles doesn't have many of the subtitles I need, for example for foreign movies or rarer or older ones; so I'd like to load my own .srt subtitles which I already have, if this can somehow be done.

 

[Old Microbiologist]

I use Plex mostly and there are subtitle settings which can link to Opensubtitles.org. The when you open a movie there is a 3 button icon to push which you can add subtitles then you either download yourself or it will do a search automatically and provide you a list to add. Press one if it matches the movie/show (often they are from an identical rip). I used to go through the somewhat painful method of finding a subtitle (there are roughly 3 sources for English Subtitles and many movies simply will not have them. you can then then add it manually into the same folder as the movie/how after renaming it to be exactly the same as the original file. It won't see them otherwise. This is true for Kodi as well. This is so much easier and painless now with this method. We use subtitles for everything as we have gotten to that age where we need them.

I use a private P2P client (actually several and they are by invitation after being vetted) and within them you can often find things that are ripped with subtitles. The private client links to a site that has clean virus free and well encoded files. I think many rips are done by younger people who never even think about subtitles. Their day will come. If you are doing P2P then do it behind a VPN with encryption especially if you are in the US and the UK (or China). Other countries don't waste their time. Russians are a great source of rips. Some people have gotten serious enough to take a foreign film subtitle file and convert it from whatever language it is in to English using google Translate on a PC/iMAC with the document convert option. This works pretty well most of the time. Iuse Google Translate all the time and especially on my phone using the camera to scan product labels to figure out what they are as Hungarian is not related to anything else in the world so unless it is a borrowed word from another language impossible to decipher. Translate works very well even with Hungarian.

Our main source of media though is Amazon Prime streaming or Netflix. Amazon Prime you have to spoof the IP address to use outside the US but always has everything with subtitles reliably (a few are off on timing which is an original source issue). Netflix is the opposite and they have gotten extremely aggressive about location. I am not too sure why as it is a token resistance here in Europe. For them you must subscribe in the country you are located in and then you are stuck as many things only have Hungarian subtitles and no English at all. I have tried several VPN blocker combinations and they always figure it out eventually. There are only so many IP address a VPN service uses and they figure these out fairly fast.

 

[rayvt]

I wonder if anyone has been able to use subtitles in .srt format over the network.

I encode the subtitles as a stream in the mkv file.
As you know, DLNA does not support subtitles. My Sony BDP-6700 plays them fine in the mkv, but not in a mp4, and not as a separate srt over dlna.

 

[davidfin]

We’ve had great success ripping our DVD’s collection to a laptop disk drive. You end up with a library of MP4s. Then install the PLEX server software on the laptop and PLEX client software on a smart TV. Then I can watch my movie library on any of my smart TVs. Plus, you can watch remotely on your pad or tablet if you have sufficient bandwidth.