Stremio
Subtitle style not displayed correctly
Stremio Platform
Windows (Beta)
Describe the bug
Recently subtitle styles are no longer being correctly displayed in the Stremio 5.0 beta. The font choice, style, color and positioning of .ass subtitles are seemingly ignored. This can make some streams completely unwatchable when subtitles that are intended to be typeset in a complex way are instead displayed without their style, causing them to potentially fill up the entire screen with paragraphs of text.
To Reproduce
Play a video that uses embedded .ass subtitles in Stremio 5.0. May need to be a .mkv.
Expected behavior
Font choice, style, color and positioning of .ass subtitles should be respected exactly as they would display in MPV or MPC-HC, and as they appear in Stremio 4.4.
Screenshots
Desktop (if applicable)
Tested on Windows 11 24H2 with Stremio 5.0.13 beta and on another Windows 10 desktop with Stremio 5.0.13 beta. Also tested in Windows Sandbox.
Smartphone (if applicable)
No response
TV (if applicable)
No response
Logs
Notes
No response
the issue here is that if we let mpv parse ASS/SSA subs, then we can't allow changing color or position of the subtitles anymore, so it may make more sense to make a setting that allows enabling ASS/SSA styles parsing then making it the default behaviour
I'd be willing to work on this issue if someone could point me to where the change was made for Stremio 5. I tried looking for it but I have no clue if it's in stremio-core, stremio-shell, or somewhere else. I'd like to add the setting @jaruba suggested.
If you're feeling extra nice, a rundown on what I'd need to do to fix this would be great, but if you're busy I respect that and will probably be able to fix it on my own.
Not sure if this helps, but it doesn't seem to be related to the app release version. Subtitles were definitely working properly in August on the Windows beta (not sure when it stopped working), and this issue seems to have popped up recently. I tried reverting to v5.05 of the Windows app and also the web app to see if anything changes, but the issue is still present.
The subtitles breaking is a major detraction from the experience, especially in cases where broken text completely fills the screen, making a show unwatchable.
Stremio:
VLC (In this case the whole "YOU KNOW" paper is a translated subtitle):
Also, #1686 and possibly #1679 are probably this same issue.
