The Butt Ugly Weblog

PS3 Media Server & YLE subtitles

Finally figured out how to get DVB/YLE subtitles working when streaming the original .TS -file (also known as .REC) from my Mac. There is a lot of info on this on the internets, but they're mostly about "I have this .SRT subtitles file that came with this illegally downloaded program, how do I show them" -variety. Not a whole lot of info on how to get it working if you grab the original media stream from the air and just want to have it nicely playing back. The thing is - YLE uses DVB subtitles which are embedded within the TS stream itself, unlike all other Finnish channels who just burn it the texts directly into the media stream (which means they can't be turned off, so this simplicity comes with a cost). Unfortunately MEncoder and FFMpeg just sort of assume that subtitles are for extreme nerds who understand intimately the structure of MPEG2 transport streams.

After trying out a myriad of extremely obscure command line options for MEncoder and FFMpeg, I ended up just disabling everything else and going with VLC. Hover on the image for further info.

That's it! Restart server, and browse to your collection with your PS3. You should now see a text "[VLC]" behind most of your media files (except the ones that can be streamed immediately).

I used PS3 Media Server 1.81.0 and VLC 2.0.6.