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Too bad Gotham cant have new features. I understand.
Is it possible to send external subtitles th. Upnp in the next xbmc version?
Thanks
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Not sure. The dev (alcoheca) who was working on this has had to step back from XBMC for the time being and take care of that pesky "real life" stuff, but I do believe he wanted to get external subs working (along with a bunch of other cool UPnP related stuff. So all in good time.
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Thanks. I understand that.
But not for Gotham isnt? Or is it possible as the main feature is UPnp?
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I've run into the same problem after installing XBMC on an old laptop I wanted to use as media center. The important feature for me was to be able to watch movies on an Android tablet, so that I can send the kids into their room to watch movies / cartoons :-) As I live in Croatia, having subtitles is a must (especially for kids).
Anyway, I did some research this weekend about UPnP/DLNA, did some Wireshark capturing and set up XBMC build env on Windows. What soon became obvious is that XBMC UPnP MediaServer never actually notifies the control point of any subtitles. So I set out to fix this, and what I came up with does work, but is not pretty (from coding point of view), since I really have little knowledge of XBMC internals.
What I did was:
- when UPnP BrowseDirectChildren request is processed for video files, I extract the file path of the movie and scan it for .srt and .sub files (these are the ones I use).
- then I check what language is set as subtitle language in settings and convert it in 2 and 3 letter code (eg. hr for croatian)
- if there are files that end in _hr.srt or _hr.sub, I pick them as subtitles, otherwise first found.
- I add new res entry in video item DIDL, specifying this as subtitle stream
And this did it, at least for my specific needs. I use BubbleUPnP on Android, and now it marks movies as having subtitle, and is able to download them and pass them to media player (only MX player seems to work with subtitles though).
I'm writing all this so that somebody doing XBMC development might implement this (and improve it hopefully) in official version as I found a lot of people were missing this functionality.
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The problem with external subtitles is that looking for them on every listing is very expensive (especially if the files reside on a network share). There needs to be a way to look for external subtitles and store the information in the database alongside other streamdetails of the file itself to not have to do the manual lookup everytime the item is being requested/played. But then again external subtitles can change anytime without the media item itself changing so there also needs to be a way to detect that.
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I completely agree. I've tried to locate this info in movie database, and there seems to be something in the table called streamdetails or something similar, but there is no filename for the subtitle. Maybe this is also something that can be refined in the future.
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I don't know what Gotham is, but from what I saw in the code, there are additional streams defined for subtitles, but there are no files linked with those. There is only langugage code. No subtitle type either. So directory scan is needed anyway.
Please don't take any of this for granted, as I said, I only spent a few hours digging in the code, and that only so I could solve a problem I had...
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Gotham is the new version of XBMC (alpha version). Soon in beta
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Ah, OK :-) I'm new in XBMC world, obviously (installed it last week first time)
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Hi mbonacci
XBMC library sharing via UPNP works flawless here, even with watched status.
All that is missing is subtitle support. Even when I manually search for the set file on the upnp share it is not found.
This is really the cherry on top of a PERFECT solution to share your library in a house.
No need for MySQL anymore! I have 1 Raspberry Pi running XBian with a small 1.5TB drive attached and it is the only hardware I have! Perfect setup with the least amount of hardware in your house.
Watching XBMC in the bedroom using a tablet or phone via UPNP library sharing is really a feature that should be promoted more.
Just the subtitle issue remains.