Formatted subtitle text with (recent) Samsung TVs (colour, font, etc.) ??

[Bob123]

Nearly two years ago we gave our mother, who starts having difficulties hearing well, a Samsung UE40ES6200 TV set as a present. Now she prefers watching TV with subtitles to better understand dialogues. Often the subtitles transmitted with the DVB-S stream (via DVB Teletext, ETSI 300-472) are displayed in different colours, e.g. for different speakers. So this works fine.

For playing video files from a USB-attached source the TV's manual says that the following external subtitle file formats are supported: MPEG-4 Timed Text (.ttxt), SAMI (.smi), SubRip (.srt), SubViewer (.sub), Micro (.sub oder .txt), SubStation Alpha (.ssa), Advanced SubStation Alpha (.ass) and Powerdivx (.psb).

Experimenting with some of these formats a bit, I have not found a way yet to display formatted subtitle text (various text colours, italic, bold, font style, etc.) – the TV always showed white text without formatting (or, with apparently incorrectly formatted subtitle files, no subtitles at all).

Does anyone have experience preparing subtitle files with formatted text (colour, font, etc.) for Samsung TVs?
Which is the preferred subtitle file format?

Many thanks for your help, Bob

[Baldrick]

Did you try ssa/ass?

But many players will ignore text formatting. You can then try image subtitles(sup,sub,idx) with for example subtitlecreator or make avi divx image subs using AVIAddXSubs. Or last burn in/hardcode the subs with for example xvid4psp( it should support ssa/ass).

[jman98]

TV player support is ALWAYS limited, often in ways that displease consumers such as in your case. There may not be any subtitle format that will support things like italic, bold, etc. When they say that they "support" a subtitle format, it usually means "We can play it, but not with any formatting options". If you really must have fancy format subtitles then you'll either need to hardcode as Baldrick suggested or perhaps buy a media player device of some kind like one of the Western Digital models as those will likely have better formatting support in subtitles than any TV player.

[Bob123]

Thanks for you reply!

I just tried SSA and ASS (on a UE55F6500): the text appears, but no text formatting (text colour, italic etc.) - too bad.

If I really want to find out I'll have to try out all the formats, I guess.

Perhaps someone else did this already?

[Bob123]

Yes, jman98, you are right! Last night I prepared test files of all supported formats and the UE55F6500 did not show any formatted/styled text with any of these external subtitle files! This is actually pretty lame...

For completeness here are the test results:
MPEG-4 Timed Text (.ttxt) -> works, style formatting ignored
SAMI (.smi) -> works, style formatting ignored
SubRip (.srt) -> works, style formatting ignored
SubViewer (.sub) -> works, style formatting ignored
Micro DVD (.sub oder .txt) -> works, but style codes are shown verbatim
SubStation Alpha (.ssa) -> works, style formatting ignored
Advanced SubStation Alpha (.ass) -> works, style formatting ignored
Powerdivx (.psb) -> works, but style codes are shown verbatim

Perhaps the SubRip format is convenient because it is simple and the inline style formatting (e.g. <font color="FF0000"><i>Hello, Dolly!</i></font>) is ignored, but shown on other devices (e.g. on a Windows PC with "Media Player Classic - Home Cinema").

Bottom line: We'll live with unformatted/unstyled subtitle text for the time being.
Thanks for your comments.