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Comment by sondh | Hacker News Reader

I have been jumping between Videostream, Plex and VLC nightly in the last few months. They seem to play all kind of video files but subtitles remain to be a hard problem. VLC simply doesn't support it (or I didn't figure out how to enable subtitles). Videostream is buggy. Plex works with a specific version only (had to downgrade to get back subtitles)... The search continues I guess.

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We have an ugly patch for subtitles over Chromecast. It will get there.

Is Chromecast support only on Android? Or will it work on Mac too?

I like plex, despite its mysterious failures during streaming (dropped wifi, stuttering on old-generation chromecast). The UI is clear, easy for me to organize, and sub-organize things for my kids to use.

Story time: this past summer I wanted to travel from Canada to Florida (3 days 2 nights) with just me and two young kids. To save on airfair I decided to drive. I bought myself the dlink DIR-505, one of those vehicle power bars, packed my laptop running plex, plugged in my portable drive that houses all my media, and I had a mobile hotspot the kids connected to from each of their devices to watch movies using plex, it was intuitive enough for them to use. With each having headphones, I even streamed my music to the car's bluetooth using plex. We went for 12hrs on our longest day, it was a huge relief from the boredom at times.

I've never had a problem with subtitles though, can you explain what you mean?

Wholeheartedly recommend Airflow: https://airflowapp.com

Has always worked perfectly, even with 4k high-bitrate video. Supports subtitles and can even fetch them for you.

Second Airflow - fantastic app on both Windows and Mac. I donated.

I've been using SodaPlayer for a good chromecast+subtitles support! It's not as feature rich as VLC, but it gets the job done

How is Videostream buggy for you? I've been trying Videostream, VLC nightlies, and Emby. The latter two were buggy for me, but Videostream (although it is just Chrome embedded rly whatever that's called) works. So I just went for a one-time Premium tax and now I can stream. Including with a remote from my Android phone.

PS: and it has Opensubtitles support. I do sometimes have to resort to using VLC to grab subtitles (for a diff language) but even VLC sometimes does not work. Then I gotta resort to, well, a web browser to grab the sub.

I think their node app has issues with Little Snitch on my laptop.

What did you have to downgrade? Subtitles work fine with the Chromecast on the most recent version of plex?

I was running 1.9.6, after an auto update to 1.10.something subtitles stopped working on Chromecast. I looked around and found a thread[1] with many people reporting the issue with many versions of Plex. One guy said he reverted to have it working again so I tried that and... it worked! I haven't updated Plex since then. Good to know that you have subtitles working with the latest version, maybe I will update when I get home, fingers crossed!

[1]https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/288806/plex-losing-subtitl...

I've found plex has a great interface, but performance when streaming to chromecast is not great

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