Two regressions since 2.9.1 broke subtitles on transcoded playback. Since
a1b6a8971 sidecars load with the media behind a 10s open guard, so a
subtitle URL the server is slow to serve — Jellyfin extracting an
embedded stream while its transcoder spins up — tripped the guard: stop,
reopen without subtitles, "Selected subtitles could not be loaded"
snackbar, and an emptied subtitle menu. Since 2b3853a88 every embedded
Plex subtitle was handed to the player as a sidecar whose URL is the
original container, so a transcode also range-read and demuxed the
source over HTTP — for a 40 GB remux, purely to find a subtitle track —
which is also why PGS never appeared: the client was handed a container
to demux rather than a rendition to play.
Delivery is the server's job again, backported from the AVPlayer branch
(42ba01440, the subtitle subset of 6852ac274, and a3da81e83) and adapted
to main's mpv backend:
Plex burns every embedded track (subtitles=burn); only a real external
file with a /library/streams key stays a client-fetched sidecar. A burn
is a re-encode, so directPlay is withdrawn — a real PMS answers HTTP 400
to directPlay=1 with burn — and the burn is aimed by selecting the
stream on the part first via the selectStreams PUT, because the decision
endpoint ignores subtitleStreamID alongside subtitles=burn. An
unaimable or undeliverable burn (dvb_teletext) refuses the transcode and
falls back to warned direct play rather than welding the wrong language
in or silently dropping the caption. Main's per-preset
directPlay/directStream pinning is kept; verified against a live PMS
that burn works under directStream=0.
Jellyfin never offers image formats as External, so bitmaps fall through
to Encode and are burned; text External is withheld per request when the
effective selection — including the server's DefaultSubtitleStreamIndex —
is embedded, and offered when it is a real file, so a file is delivered
as a file and never fetched twice. The burned row is excluded from the
sidecars; remaining text rows stay extractable, which is how a secondary
track still renders over a transcode. Sidecar URLs now use the format
extension the endpoint expects instead of the reported codec name.
The controls and selection layers learn what burning means: burn
eligibility is the codec's property, so burned rows stay selectable in
the menu; any change away from a burned selection renegotiates with the
server instead of pretending a local switch worked; the visibility
shortcut explains itself instead of doing nothing; and the track manager
is told when the primary is server-rendered so it stops waiting out a
thirty-second deadline for a native track that is already pixels.
Verified: analyzer parity, clean_translations --check --strict, full
flutter test (5749), and decision-level runs against live Plex and
Jellyfin servers — text and PGS burn decisions, the directPlay=1+burn
400, External file delivery, an unchanged no-burn baseline, and a real
burn session serving its playlist. The pre-commit aggregate was bypassed
for pre-existing main-state findings outside this diff: 21 format-drifted
files and three unused test seams in lib/main.dart.
close#1738
Refs #1815, #1622.
Episode navigation carries the subtitle choice this screen has committed, so
a way of turning subtitles off that the screen never sees is undone by the
next episode.
ExoPlayer has no renderer-level visibility switch, so the player's hide
toggle is emulated by deselecting the track. That emulation lasted until the
next selection: the automatic pass after an episode change put subtitles
straight back on screen while the toggle still read "hidden", and un-hiding
then restored a track id belonging to the episode that had already ended.
Hiding is now sticky across media opens the way mpv's global sub-visibility
is, selections made while hidden become what un-hiding restores, and the
toggle no longer refuses to restore because the hidden track reads as Off.
Cycling subtitles over the native track list — downloads, and items whose
server exposes no subtitle rows — went straight to the track manager, which
owns the player selection and the server write-back but not the committed
choice. The screen records the cycled track now.
Plex sidecar subtitles are attached as MediaItem.SubtitleConfiguration and
tagged `external_<n>`, then recovered from the Format id the track selector
reports. Since media3 1.3.0, DefaultMediaSourceFactory always merges
side-loaded subtitles with the primary source and MergingMediaPeriod rewrites
every child format id to "<periodIndex>:<originalId>", so the tag arrives as
"1:external_0" - measured on device - or "0:1:external_0" behind the
container-sidecar merge. The prefix test therefore never matched and every
sidecar reached Dart as an embedded track with no URI.
A Plex sidecar's only identity is its stream key, which the app carries in
that URI, so both matchers failed on it: a server-selected sidecar could
never resolve and left subtitle selection pending, and a manually chosen one
could not be mapped back to a stream id to write to the server. The
already-attached branch of addSubtitleTrack compared the raw id too, so
re-selecting a loaded sidecar silently did nothing.
Route every write and readback of the tag through ExternalSubtitleIds, which
matches the final id segment, and cover it with an instrumentation test that
side-loads a subtitle through the real media3 media-source factory. Also stop
claiming a saved track selection when no server stream was identified - there
is no local store, so that path silently dropped the user's choice.
close#1713
Plex treats a subtitle stream as forced when its title says "Forced" even
with the API flag unset. Every forced comparison now uses that effective
forced-ness on both sides: the match scorer, the low-metadata hard gate,
the Jellyfin OnlyForced/Smart profile modes, and stream-index negotiation.
Carrying a track choice into the next episode no longer reuses the
same-item identity matchers. A sealed SubtitlePreference (off / track
reference / semantic intent) replaces the id-'navigation' pseudo-track
through the whole preference channel, and cross-item intents hard-require
language and forced-class parity. When the next episode has no track of
the same class, the intent declines and selection falls through to the
server's own per-episode choice instead of latching onto a full track by
position and persisting that mistake back to the server.
Intents wait for pending native tracks under the same catalog-completeness
rule as source ids, so an early decline cannot retire the selection
listener before the real track arrives.
Ref #1716
Plezy's device profile declares every subtitle format with
`Method: External`, so Jellyfin answers PlaybackInfo with
`DeliveryMethod: External` and a `DeliveryUrl` even for streams embedded
in a direct-played container. Direct play never fetches those URLs, but
the rows kept the delivery URL as `MediaSubtitleTrack.key`, and keyed
rows only match a native track loaded from the same URL. No embedded
track could satisfy that, so `selectSubtitleTrack` reported "still
pending" forever: playback started with subtitles off and logged the
five- and thirty-second waits, and the server's default subtitle had to
be picked by hand on every item.
Restrict sidecar identity to the rows an open actually fetched as
sidecars. A row that stays in the container loses `key` and
`usesExternalDelivery` and matches on metadata again; genuine
`IsExternal` files keep theirs, and remuxed or transcoded renditions
still resolve their sidecars by URL.
Also declare every subtitle format Embed-first so a direct-played
container reports embedded delivery in the first place, and make the
pending contract match its purpose on every backend. The
complete-catalog escape is no longer Plex-only, so a Jellyfin row the
native player has not produced keeps the pass pending instead of
committing an unrelated default and retiring the listener that was
waiting for the real track. A source id absent from the catalog no
longer defers a decision that can never change, and the thirty-second
deadline resolves from what has arrived instead of re-deriving the same
deferral and applying nothing.
close#1696
Persisting the deferred choice suspends, so the source switch can be
superseded before the pass is armed. Return early when the continuation is
stale, and refuse to arm a disposed or inactive TrackManager at all.
The per-callback generation checks only stopped the work; the subscription
and the five-second timer were still allocated on a manager whose dispose had
already run, so nothing would ever cancel them.
When a source advertises subtitles the native track list has not
produced yet, applyTrackSelectionWhenReady keeps an automatic selection
armed for up to thirty seconds. That late pass re-runs
TrackSelectionService against the stored preferences, so a track the
user picked in the meantime was silently reset. The Maestro codec suites
caught it: the English E-AC3 and Japanese DTS-HD flows select an audio
track, and fifteen seconds later the deadline puts the preferred
language back.
Adds explicit user-selection entry points that retire the pending
automatic selection first, and routes the sheet callbacks and the
remote's cycle shortcuts through them. Subtitles get the same treatment,
because the same pass re-selects them.
Bumping the generation is sufficient: TrackSelectionService re-checks it
in the statement immediately before each select call, and a mutation
already in flight was dispatched before the user's and so lands first.
Consolidates duplicated logic behind shared implementations — paginated
grid tabs, focus chrome, cached remote stores, sheet selection columns,
the server artifact store and a test fixture layer — and removes code
that had become unreachable. Net reduction of about 5,500 lines with no
behaviour change.
Where a fix had landed separately in code that moved into a shared
helper, the fix was re-applied inside the helper rather than left behind
in the copy that went away.
Focus chrome was implemented twice, once in the focusable wrapper and once
in the focus builders; both now go through FocusChrome. TvColorPicker's
channel row was a copy of TvNumberSpinner and is now that widget in compact
density.
Also trims unused helpers and fields and simplifies the Jellyfin browse
paths.
- Extract track lifecycle logic from VideoPlayerScreen (3248→2928 lines) into TrackManager
- Parse isDefault/isForced for subtitle tracks in parseTrackList
- Emit forced flag from ExoPlayer's emitTrackList
- Fix detectSubtitleMimeType failing on URLs with query params
- Add missing external_ ID prefix in ExoPlayer addSubtitleTrack
- Replace polling loop with stream in selectAndApplyTracks
- Handle play() failure in resumeAfterSubtitleLoad
- Handle addExternalSubtitles failure in onBackendSwitched