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HDMI-out video playing : how to get subtitles displayed ?

Hi,
Does anybody manage to get subtitles when using the hdmi-output ? The Video Google Player does not detect srt at all, and when I'm using another player (mobo, rock, mvideoplayer, etc...), the movie is displayed through hdmi-out but the subtitles stick to the TF screen ! Not really handy to watch a movie ;-) I would like to keep hardware acceleration (to play 720p movie) and get subtitle displayed through the hdmi-output without hard-burning the srt if possible.
Has anyone already tried to watch movies with subtitles through hdmi output ?
Thanks !

This is just a thought but have you tried embedding the subtitles into the video container (e.g. mkv)? You can use the application mkvmerge GUI to re-mux the video as an mkv and add the subtitle file resulting in one file which has video/audio/subtitles.
Free tool: MKVToolnix -- Cross-platform tools for Matroska
These mkv tools includes the mkvmerge GUI that I mentioned. My thinking is that if the subtitle file was part of the video container the Android players may play them in a way that gets around the issue you are having. This would be the most efficient method as no transcoding of you video would be required.
The method that would definitely work would be "hard coding" the subtitles onto the video frames. This does away with the need for a subtitle file but does require that the video is transcoded.
Handbrake documentation: See "Hard Burn"
Free tool: Handbrake Downloads
Good luck

Hi,
Thanks for the answer, I knew about hardburning ; see my question : "get subtitle displayed through the hdmi-output without hard-burning the srt if possible"... Moreover, it seems that mkv is not well recognised by stock video player (google video player), and I reencoded mkv to mp4, with a subtitle track, but the players I tried did not load mp4 subtitles (though it did with mkv, but mkv is really slow compared to mp4). Anyway, thanks for your suggestion ! I will dig a little bit, to see if I can build an mkv file with video in H264, subtitles, and hardware acceleration...

Haven't tried it myself as I haven't got hdmi out working yet but can you use splash top to remote to yr PC, play the video through PC app with subtitles, and output the remote session to tv? I believe I recall someone saying they do this using splash top HD (think you have to pay for that, poster said it was worth it).
For what it's worth I have the same issue with my iPad.

Thanks for the tip, but splashtop hd does not work on linux, and dont have/want windows machine at home.

Did you solve it ? I'm having the same issue :\
It sucks because english it's not my native language and one of the reasons why i bought this tablet was for use it as a media player on the tv ..

fixed by buying a popcorn hour... Tf is not ready for replacing a network media tank. Definitely.

It works for me with BSPlayer and using software decoding mode in preferences.

With MX Player free subtitles work ok. With BS Player and Dice Player subtitles are shown in the tablet but not in the tv, they worked before but not anymore since one of the last ota updates.. i dont know if they changed something related to overlay in the rom because it used to work for me some weeks ago.

lumav said:
It works for me with BSPlayer and using software decoding mode in preferences.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah that's the only way i could make it work. Does anyone know if there's any player that supports subtitles with hardware decoding ? (through hdmi output)

hardcorekb said:
Yeah that's the only way i could make it work. Does anyone know if there's any player that supports subtitles with hardware decoding ? (through hdmi output)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
There isn't. For me, it seems that the hardware decoding prevents somehow to display subtitles through hdmi output.

software limitation?
i'm hoping that this is a software limitation that can be fixed someday.. anybody knows?

Good lord. Just install a custom firmware. For example revolver works for sure on the third android. I have not tried on ics though. Mx player allows 2+ subs btw. (i have suggested this feature btw also)

Extreemator said:
Good lord. Just install a custom firmware. For example revolver works for sure on the third android. I have not tried on ics though. Mx player allows 2+ subs btw. (i have suggested this feature btw also)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
We are talking about Hardware accelerated video WITH subtitles over HDMI..
MxPlayer works in Software mode only..

As what I see
hardware acceleration does not render the soft subtitles together with the video
looks like there are "2 different layer" display video on your device screen with hardware acceleration
Playing on your device screen (SW mode)
sw layer= the UI of your video player, soft subtitles, SW rendered video - on device screen as a layer
hw layer= none
*you see everything on device screen, but video may stutter
Playing on your device screen (HW mode)
sw layer= the UI of your video player, and soft subtitles - on device screen as top layer
hw layer= the video - on device screen as 2nd layer
*you see everything on device screen, perfectly
Playing thru HDMI on HDTV or any display monitor (SW mode)
sw layer= the UI of your video player, soft subtitles and SW rendered video - on both device screen and HDTV/Monitor as a layer, you see everything but video stuttering cos lack of hardware acceleration
hw layer= none
*you see everything on both device screen and HDTV/Monitor, but video may stutter
Playing thru HDMI on HDTV or any display monitor (HW mode)
sw layer= the UI of your video player and soft subtitles - on device screen, you see only UI and soft subtitles.
hw layer=video only (hardware accelerated) - on HDTV/Monitor thru HDMI, you see only video, no soft subtitles, no video player UI
*you see only video on HDTV/Monitor, then videoplayer UI and soft subtitles on device screen.
it seems hardware acceleration disables UI to be displayed on HDTV/Monitor thru HDMI when a HW mode video playback is active.
I hope video player developers can find a way allow the soft subtitles to be display together with video on HDMI output someday
As for now, if you want to see soft subtitle on HDTV thru hdmi output, you have to re-encode the videos with subtitles (hard sub)
or
Watch It on SW mode, thats extremely lag and looks bad especially for HD videos

I got a ASUS TF300T and I'm having the same issue, not only with internal videos, but when I run netflix the subtitles just display on the Pad's screen and not on the HDTV. T_T

Some solution for this? I use bus player with software decoding and tit was the temporally solution....
But I need to know some solution to resolve with hardware decoding

hardcorekb said:
Yeah that's the only way i could make it work. Does anyone know if there's any player that supports subtitles with hardware decoding ? (through hdmi output)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Try MX Player and send reports back.
I dont have HDMI cable for my tablet At the moment so.
Try it.

MX Player is displaying with SW mode but laggy in HD videos.HW mode dont display any subs on HDMI output.I embed the subs into the video with VirtualDub,with a plugin inside, especially for HD videos, it plays well.

Hello all,
I have discovered a way to display subtitles on HDMI even when using HW-accelerated video from either MX Player or BS Player...
BTW, this option only works for Asus TF300T official JellyBean firmware...
Go to Settings --> Developer options --> Drawing --> enable "Disable HW Overlays" checkbox
This will force GPU to do all compositing work. Videos will now play wth subtitles on HDMI even if HW-accelerated. The downside is that the video is displayed on both the tablet as well as the HDMI port unlike before where the video is only displayed on the HDMI port and the UI remains with the tablet in HW-accelerated mode.
Hope this helps...
^_^
P.S.
This does not fix the issue of MX Player not being able to use HW-acceleration properly (choppy video or falls back to SW-decoding) for files that used to play fine pre-Jellybean OTA update. Just use BS Player for the meantime until MX Player gets fixed. I miss the nice ASS subtitles that MX Player renders though...

MX Player and MKV on Note 10.1

Friends
has any of you tried playing a 1080p MKV with MX Player in HW+ mode? On my note it's choppy and i have to revert back to HW only, where volume can go up only to 100% and not 200%.
All is ok with DIVx movies in HW+ mode.
Thanks

try this, it plays everything
https://play.google.com/store/apps/...v7neon&feature=nav_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDNd

The stock media player should be able to play everything smoothly as long as you are not playing over wifi. However it cannot decode / sum 5.1 channels to stereo so on some 5.1 films you may either get no sound or the wrong language depending on how the MKV was ripped in the first place.
I find that BS player is the best software decoder by far, it get the best results using this for films that play with no sound on the stock. These are the only two video players you should ever need to install.
VLC is ok but the performance isn't as good as BS yet, however it being open source it might get better and be able to sum 5.1 and decode hardware in the future with a bit of luck.
For now always try stock first and then move to BS player as a fall back, don't bother with anything else. (IMHO)

da.trute said:
The stock media player should be able to play everything smoothly as long as you are not playing over wifi. However it cannot decode / sum 5.1 channels to stereo so on some 5.1 films you may either get no sound or the wrong language depending on how the MKV was ripped in the first place.
I find that BS player is the best software decoder by far, it get the best results using this for films that play with no sound on the stock. These are the only two video players you should ever need to install.
VLC is ok but the performance isn't as good as BS yet, however it being open source it might get better and be able to sum 5.1 and decode hardware in the future with a bit of luck.
For now always try stock first and then move to BS player as a fall back, don't bother with anything else. (IMHO)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I do have BS, but I tend to use MX on the train as it's so noisy and MX is the only one being able to go to 200% volume
In addition MX has SW, HW and HW+ and with DIVx I usually emable HW+ with no problem, but with MKVs only SW and HW works, while with HW+ sound is good (bettere than with HW and SW) but video is choppy.
I also have Wondershare as it's the only player playing DVD images handling the dvd menu: no need anymore to converts my MASH DVDs to divx, I just use dvd shrink to rip a 4GB image of the DVD on the tablet (quality of MAS is so bad being old that 70% compression makes no difference)

[Q] 10 bit 1080p Video

Has anyone tried 10 bit video yet? How does the shield perform?

It works fine for me. I've played the Video in XBMC, MX Player and VLC. All of them are able to play my highest quality stuff (2GB MKV with a length of about 24 minutes) with SSA subtitles with no lag. However, in XBMC and MX Player there is noticeable corruption in the image and discoloration as well. It is worse the higher the bitrate with it being most unnoticeable with 10bit 720p video. There is a hint of it with 8bit, so much so I'm not sure if it is an optical illusion or not. For whatever reason I did not see this with VLC. I think it is because it was using software codec versus hardware codec. I'm not entirely sure because VLC would crash if I took it Auto for which Codec to use. Also the H/W+ codec in MX Player would crash no matter what video I tried to play (resolution or 8/10bit). Also XBMC would crash if I limited the codec to only Stagefright. The other Hardware Codec and Software Rendering worked just fine.

Dear trowgundam,
did you try the version v1.7.31 of MX Player Pro? It now supports natively the K1 but it isn't so stable...

sev7en said:
Dear trowgundam,
did you try the version v1.7.31 of MX Player Pro? It now supports natively the K1 but it isn't so stable...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Just to clarify that I'm using v1.7.31 of MX Player Pro and the colour corruption\pixelation is still present with HW+ or HW decoder used. SW decoder works fine for most purposes. I see the same problem in XBMC (latest nightly) with Hardware acceleration used.
I did find the performance suffers a little bit with the SW decoder (got a lot of dropped frames on a very high bitrate version of Psycho-Pass I was watching but everything else seemed fine, nowhere near as bad as my old Nexus 10 however which is a massive plus). The tablet gets quite hot and battery life really suffers as I'm guessing only the CPU is being utilized?
It's a damn shame because the HW decoder works fine with 10-bit video apart from this problem but it can get so bad in certain scenes that it's not really usable.

Skip forward/backward function acts weird on my device.

I have a 2015 model of sony bravia android tv, and it has a MT5890 CPU and a mali T-624 GPU. I installed the latest version of mx player and armv7 neon codec.
I am able to play x265 coded videos with built-in video player without any problem, it's very smooth, and I can skip forward or backward or just jump to whenever I wish to.
However when using mx player, it's also very smooth, but I can only play from the beginning, if I try to skip forward or backward, or jump to a certain time point, it starts to act very weird. Sometimes video speeds up 2x or 3x, sometimes it slows down, like it's catching up or slowing down to wait audio to be synchronized. And it can take from couple of minutes to half an hour to go back to normal.
This only applies to x265 coded videos, I have other video that are coded with x264 or HEVC, and they work just fine in both built-in player and mx player.
I have tried other video players like spmc, kodi or VLC, they all stutter, VLC is probably the best among these but it is still dropping frames left and right. But most of them don't have problem with skipping or jumping.
Can someone please explain the reason? Could it be fixed?
Much appreciated!

terrytw said:
I have a 2015 model of sony bravia android tv, and it has a MT5890 CPU and a mali T-624 GPU. I installed the latest version of mx player and armv7 neon codec.
I am able to play x265 coded videos with built-in video player without any problem, it's very smooth, and I can skip forward or backward or just jump to whenever I wish to.
However when using mx player, it's also very smooth, but I can only play from the beginning, if I try to skip forward or backward, or jump to a certain time point, it starts to act very weird. Sometimes video speeds up 2x or 3x, sometimes it slows down, like it's catching up or slowing down to wait audio to be synchronized. And it can take from couple of minutes to half an hour to go back to normal.
This only applies to x265 coded videos, I have other video that are coded with x264 or HEVC, and they work just fine in both built-in player and mx player.
I have tried other video players like spmc, kodi or VLC, they all stutter, VLC is probably the best among these but it is still dropping frames left and right. But most of them don't have problem with skipping or jumping.
Can someone please explain the reason? Could it be fixed?
Much appreciated!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Basically, x265 is an encoder for HEVC. So, both are same.
Maybe some particular HEVC profile has issues. Can you try HW+ decoder?

Thirumalai.K said:
Basically, x265 is an encoder for HEVC. So, both are same.
Maybe some particular HEVC profile has issues. Can you try HW+ decoder?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
In fact I am using HW+ decoder, and it's the only way I can play those videos smoothly. Switching to HW or SW would make the video either completely unplayable or stutter very heavily.
To sum it up, I CAN play any videos with built-in player smoothly and drag or jump or skip however I want to.
I CAN play x265 coded files smoothly with mx player in HW+ mode, but I CANNOT jump or skip. I CAN play any other videos with mx player without any problem.
I CAN play x265 coded files with some level of stutter with other players like spmc and VLC, but I CAN drag or jump however I want to.
The videos that I am having problem with have these kind of parameters:
Format : HEVC
Format Info : High Efficiency Video Coding
Format profile : Main [email protected]@High
Codec ID : V_MPEGH/ISO/HEVC
Writing library : x265 2.5+4-b4a5bcfe29c7:[Windows][GCC 4.9.3][64 bit] 10bit
If the writing library is x264 or ATEME Titan KFE or ATEME Titan file, or if the codec ID is hev1, or if the format profile is Main [email protected]@Main, I don't have a problem.
This is so weird....

To the TC - Did you ever get this sorted?
I am having the same issue on my Sony Bravia. Whilst the actual player is exactly what I wanted, I get exactly the same issue when fast forwarding or rewinding.
I have played around with the different codec settings but it doesn't seem to make any differences.
Did you end up finding a solution?
Cheers

littlelostkiwi said:
To the TC - Did you ever get this sorted?
I am having the same issue on my Sony Bravia. Whilst the actual player is exactly what I wanted, I get exactly the same issue when fast forwarding or rewinding.
I have played around with the different codec settings but it doesn't seem to make any differences.
Did you end up finding a solution?
Cheers
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Glad to see that I am not alone. But unfortunately I did not find any solution and had given up on this.
After all, it is only a tiny fraction of all the videos have this kind of behavior.

Thank you for the confirmation

Freezing image on H264 with HW+ decoder

Hi, I've recently started using MX Player on my Android TV as its HW+ decoder plays very high bitrate 4K HDR H265 very smoothly whereas VLC player stutters. Really liking it so far.
However, I started to notice an issue with the HW+ decoder on H264: a lot of times, somewhere at the start of the video, the image freezes. Meanwhile, audio and subtitle tracks continue. This is easily resolved by just skipping a few seconds forwards or backwards, but it happens so often that it is a bit annoying. So I'm wondering if this is a known issue and if it has a known solution, despite that I can't seem to find anything about it after searching the forums.
I haven't bothered with providing custom codecs as I figure that isn't needed unless MX Player asks you to, but I did notice that MX Player uses the Neon codecs on my Android TV.
Things I've tried so far:
- Use the alternate HW+ decoder. Unfortunately this seems to perform not as good on high bitrate videos, and wide color gamut support seems absent on HDR videos, so I figured this one has more downsides than the original one.
- Disable H264 support on the HW+ decoder, so that it uses the HW decoder by default for H264. This works quite well, but for some reason, HW decoder seems to fail on many of my videos, causing MX player to fall back to SW, which gives noticeably worse performance and picture quality on my Android TV.
If I can't solve the freezing image on the HW+ decoder, I'd be interested to know how to best debug failures of the HW decoder so I can more reliably fall back to HW for H264.

shvklatch said:
- Disable H264 support on the HW+ decoder, so that it uses the HW decoder by default for H264. This works quite well, but for some reason, HW decoder seems to fail on many of my videos, causing MX player to fall back to SW, which gives noticeably worse performance and picture quality on my Android TV.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Probably the issue is either with your videos or system decoders.
H264 is supported on most of the devices. HW decoder is basically a wrapper for Android mediaplayer implemented on your device.
So, Most of the issues on HW decoder is from the device firmware itself.
HW+ decoder also uses the decoders available on the system. From the symptoms, it looks like your system decoder freezes or fails to decode the video frames.
Can you connect your device to a system in debugging mode & collect the logs while reproducing the issue?
It will give better insight into the issue.

Hi! Thank you for your reply. I figured you might be right about any HW decoder issues being caused by the system or the videos themselves, so I tried some stuff out. For instance, forcing VLC player to use hardware acc., the same videos play without issue, over and over again. Puzzled with this, I removed MX player completely from the Android TV device, and then installed it again. To my surprise, this fixed the HW decoder issues. The same H264 videos could now be played effortlessly with the HW decoder. In fact, I don't have any issue with H264 videos on the HW decoder at all anymore. This is great, but unfortunately also means I can no longer produce logs of the HW decoder issue I experienced. Not sure what happened there.
The HW+ decoder issue remains however. I'm still seeing the video track getting stuck on a single frame close at the start of H264 videos, until I skip forward or backward. Audio and subtitle tracks continue as normal. This behavior is completely inconsistent, seemingly random and not always occurring, even on the same video. This happened not even once during all my tests with the HW decoder, nor on any H265 video with the HW+ decoder. I will attempt to collect logs while reproducing and report back here once I succeed. (this could take a while)

shvklatch said:
Hi! Thank you for your reply. I figured you might be right about any HW decoder issues being caused by the system or the videos themselves, so I tried some stuff out. For instance, forcing VLC player to use hardware acc., the same videos play without issue, over and over again. Puzzled with this, I removed MX player completely from the Android TV device, and then installed it again. To my surprise, this fixed the HW decoder issues. The same H264 videos could now be played effortlessly with the HW decoder. In fact, I don't have any issue with H264 videos on the HW decoder at all anymore. This is great, but unfortunately also means I can no longer produce logs of the HW decoder issue I experienced. Not sure what happened there.
The HW+ decoder issue remains however. I'm still seeing the video track getting stuck on a single frame close at the start of H264 videos, until I skip forward or backward. Audio and subtitle tracks continue as normal. This behavior is completely inconsistent, seemingly random and not always occurring, even on the same video. This happened not even once during all my tests with the HW decoder, nor on any H265 video with the HW+ decoder. I will attempt to collect logs while reproducing and report back here once I succeed. (this could take a while)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks in advance. If you can provide the device logs, we will definitely look into the issue.

Thirumalai.K said:
Thanks in advance. If you can provide the device logs, we will definitely look into the issue.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't have any logs yet, but I came in to report what I believe to be relevant in case anyone else has the same issues: I think you were right about something being off with the system's decoders.
My Android TV device, a Philips 65PUS8102/12 TV, had performance issues with 4k videos and some very high bitrate Full HD videos. I grew fond of MX Player because its HW+ decoder was still capable of running 4k videos smoothly, where nothing else could. It was still a lot to process and skipping forward/backwards was pretty much impossible on these 4k videos because of it. Then there were the h264 issues I reported here, like the frozen frames. Oddly enough, while performance and skipping worked perfectly on both the HW+ and HW decoder for h264 videos, every player using HW acceleration including MX did stutter on some of the very high bitrate ones full hd videos (that still came nowhere near the 4k video bitrates).
A few days ago, Philips issued a massive software update that included both an Android update from 6.0.1 to 7.1.1, and bugfixes resolving 4k performance and some decoding issues. Right now, MX Player's HW+ decoder is no longer the only way for me to play 4k videos smoothly. What's more, skipping works perfectly on them now, and any reproducible issue I had on h264 (both performance-related and freezing frames) I haven't been able to reproduce since.
So if anyone faces the same issues as mine with my particular TV or another from Philips sharing the same software-base, make sure you're fully updated to the Android 7 release to presumably resolve at least several of these issues.

shvklatch said:
I don't have any logs yet, but I came in to report what I believe to be relevant in case anyone else has the same issues: I think you were right about something being off with the system's decoders.
My Android TV device, a Philips 65PUS8102/12 TV, had performance issues with 4k videos and some very high bitrate Full HD videos. I grew fond of MX Player because its HW+ decoder was still capable of running 4k videos smoothly, where nothing else could. It was still a lot to process and skipping forward/backwards was pretty much impossible on these 4k videos because of it. Then there were the h264 issues I reported here, like the frozen frames. Oddly enough, while performance and skipping worked perfectly on both the HW+ and HW decoder for h264 videos, every player using HW acceleration including MX did stutter on some of the very high bitrate ones full hd videos (that still came nowhere near the 4k video bitrates).
A few days ago, Philips issued a massive software update that included both an Android update from 6.0.1 to 7.1.1, and bugfixes resolving 4k performance and some decoding issues. Right now, MX Player's HW+ decoder is no longer the only way for me to play 4k videos smoothly. What's more, skipping works perfectly on them now, and any reproducible issue I had on h264 (both performance-related and freezing frames) I haven't been able to reproduce since.
So if anyone faces the same issues as mine with my particular TV or another from Philips sharing the same software-base, make sure you're fully updated to the Android 7 release to presumably resolve at least several of these issues.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
We are pleased to know that your issue is resolved.
As I have mentioned earlier, many of the issue with hardware accelerations are usually from the firmware itself. It can affect each app in a different manner based on their implementation. And finding a workaround without an actual device is also very difficult.
Thanks for providing the information about the firmware update. It will help us to guide our users if they are unaware of it.