Forum Discussion

John2019's avatar
John2019
Channel Surfer
2 years ago
Solved

Roku Media Player, Non-channel, Home-streamed, BIF file Trick Play

Roku Model: 3931RW Roku Express+ SW ver: 13.1.4, build 1510-AE Roku Media Player (RMP) ver:  5.5, build 13 Twonky DLNA Server ver: 8.5.2-20210413 WMP DLNA Server ver: Win 11 22H2 I would like to...
  • renojim's avatar
    renojim
    2 years ago

    The problem is probably the DLNA server.  RMP only knows there's a BIF file out there if the server reports it and I'm not even sure that DLNA servers support such a thing or not.  Putting movie.mkv and movie.bif on a USB drive and plugging it into a Roku device that supports one would certainly get you trick play images.  I know atc98092 uses Serviio, but I don't know if he uses BIF files.  I'd be willing to bet that Plex supports them, but that's just a guess and it probably requires running their server and not any old DLNA server.  Emby may be another option, but I know even less about that than Plex and I know very little about Plex.  🙂

  • John2019's avatar
    John2019
    2 years ago

    Thanks, it looks like Jellyfin might fix my RMP issue; but it's as cumbersome as Emby to install on my NAS (WD My Cloud).  The only instructions I found were dated (i.e., are for OS3, I'm on OS5).

    I think renojim is correct.  I cannot find anything about BIF for either WMP or Twonky.  At this point, I am reasonably sure they don't support serving them.

    Plex creates and serves its own BIF files, which would save me the time of doing it myself; but I am not wanting to move to Plex.

    I believe it's a closed issue for me, as I am not ready to risk bricking my NAS by trying to manually install another DLNA.  As I said before, this issue is not that important to me.  It was more of an intellectual exercise.  Since it looks like there is too much risk for not enough reward, I am accepting renojim's response.

    Thanks.

atc98092's avatar
atc98092
Community Streaming Expert
2 years ago

I have Jellyfin installed on my test server. I just tried it with my Premiere 3920, the lowest performance Roku I have. It's playing my TS files and permitting trick play (FF, pause, rewind) that RMP won't. And the user interface is nicer than RMP. But one thing I did notice is that it won't display the text captions that are embedded in the video. These were all recorded OTA TV broadcasts, and they all have EIA-608 captions. RMP will display these captions, but for some reason Jellyfin doesn't see them. It does see SRT files, so at least that works. 

renojim's avatar
renojim
Community Streaming Expert
2 years ago
atc98092 wrote:

But one thing I did notice is that it won't display the text captions that are embedded in the video. These were all recorded OTA TV broadcasts, and they all have EIA-608 captions. RMP will display these captions, but for some reason Jellyfin doesn't see them.

This is interesting.  I didn't know Roku devices had that capability.  I've been using a program I found a while back to turn the captions from recorded broadcasts into an SRT file.  I may have to look into this. 🤔

  • atc98092's avatar
    atc98092
    Community Streaming Expert
    2 years ago

    Yes, Roku devices will display text based captions. This includes external files, such as .SRT, or embedded in the video like OTA broadcasts. Of course, very few commercial DVDs or Blu Rays used that form. They use image based captions, which no Roku can display. A media server can bu-rn those captions into the video feed, but that requires video transcoding and it's preferable to use a more powerful computer to handle the load. Almost all of my OTA recordings have text based EIA-608 captions, but I'm not aware of any commercial disc I've ever purchased that has anything but PGS or VOBSUB, both image based. 

  • AvsGunnar's avatar
    AvsGunnar
    Community Streaming Expert
    2 years ago

    atc98092 

    I do remember something about the eia-608/708 subtitles being an issue on github discussions.  I think it was a container issue and web-client issue.  The Jellyfin Codec page says they are supported  https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/codec-support/, and I remember having to enable "Allow All" under the "Disable different types of embedded subtitles" setting under the Libraries setting. (dashboard/libraries)

    If you use Jellyfin through the channel/app, or even the web server (127.0.0.1:8096), the 608 subtitles aren't detected, but if using DLNA (the Roku Media Player), then they are detected.

    Some users reported resolving the issue, but I never got it to work. (other than using RMP).

    ---

    I had given up on that and just extracted the 608 subtitles using ffmpeg and either converted them to srt or just downloaded vtt/srt and placed them into the mkv container so they were visible to both the Jellyfin channel/app and Roku Media Player.