Looking for inexpensive Blu-ray player with wide ranging subtitle support

[JeremyBrown]

I have a relative that needs a Blu-ray player that can read video content from USB drives but they must have subtitles when watching movies.

The content they will be watching will include such subtitles as PGS subs, VobSubs, Sub Station Alpha all the way down to to plain SRTs. They are usually muxed into the stream but can be just a separate file or set of files(when it comes to .sub .idx).


Someone told me that Samsung players have good support for subtitles. Looks like I can pick one up for around $60 which is about what I can afford. I just want to get confirmation that the Samsungs will play the subs OK. Also, most of my content is DTS audio with some containing AC3 5.1 audio and others with AAC. I'll need support for that too if possible. I'm tired of having to re-encode my stuff for them so that her Vizio TV will play them.


Please let me know your recommendations but keep in mind that I don't have a lot of money to spend...like $100 at most.


I don't care about anything else but maximum subtitle support. They don't even have Blu-ray's on their Netflix plan.

[usually_quiet]

Pick out some Blu-Ray players in your price range, download the PDF manuals, and browse through them. If the Blu-Ray player supports media file playback, there will be a section detailing which audio and video formats, container file formats, and subtitle formats are allowed. The link for the manual may be on the manufacturer's product page or support page.

[JeremyBrown]

Yeah. I've read a few but one can't always trust what a manual says and they are not altogether clear on whether the file can be muxed or un-muxed and stuff like that so I'd like someone that has had personal experience with Samsung or other players in that price range to give me their experiences.

Thanks

[jman98]

Does this relative need subtitle support in a language other than English? If so then you need to both name the language AND state the country where you intend to buy this player. That will add quite a bit of difficulty if that is the case. We used to get posts all the time from people who were from the Middle East, bought players in Europe, took them home and then found out that there was no Arabic subtitle support. So it's best to avoid a roughly similar situation if you've neglected to mention it.

My experience is that SRT ALWAYS is best supported and EVERYTHING else is not as well supported. Unfortunately support is rarely as cut and dry as the documents make it seem and you'll find out things like SRT needs to be external to work or ASS only works if you mux it and then only in MKV containers, and so on.

I have an older Samsung 3D BluRay player and it plays subs fine but to be honest with you, I pretty much keep everything to SRT format because it's just too much hassle to deal with almost everything else and I've rarely used other formats. For Divx, subs must be external but MKV they can be muxed into the container or external, either way, as long as the external sub file has the same naming convention as the video file.

[JeremyBrown]

They're in the states but their native language is Spanish and they prefer Spanish subs if it's an English movie and vica versa if not. They can get by with English subs just fine.

I planned on just down downloading a Spanish SRT and throwing it in the folder but having them fall back to what's muxed in if I cant find a spanish sub will be nice. I usually leave the Spanish subs in along with the English ones when I mux knowing that one day I may send them the file. Switching between different sub tracks would be nice. Any thoughts on that and what else I wrote?


Thanks a ton.