Tutorial: Subtitling Basics

[Christopher]

Burning subtitles should be selected in Mezzmo if your device is not capable of displaying embedded or external subtitles. Burning subtitles will require full video transcoding even when the original video format can be played natively by your device.

Some subtitle formats such as Karaoke or Advanced Substation Alpha (ASS) may have extra display or positional attributes that Mezzmo does not burn into the transcoded video. Attributes include special colors, overlapping and dynamic presentation. Mezzmo will ignore these attributes and just burn the subtitle text into the transcoded video using your selected burning font, size and color.

[Christopher]

The Subtitle Settings dialog can be used for previewing subtitles and for modifying the settings when Mezzmo reads subtitles and burns subtitles.

To display the Subtitle Settings dialog:

1. Select a video file.
2. Click Edit / Properties to display the Properties dialog and click the Subtitles tab.
3. Select an external subtitle track from the list.
4. Click Subtitle Settings to preview the subtitles.

For specific details about functionality, press F1 in the Subtitle Settings dialog to display the Mezzmo Help file.

Tip: It is recommended to select the language for each subtitle track. The language is used by Mezzmo for choosing subtitle tracks for streaming, and is required for proper encoding of text based subtitle files to match your device’s capabilities.

Tip: Set the code page and font for the subtitle if the subtitles are not displayed correctly in the dialog or on your device.

Tip: Use Global Settings to specify the settings for all your subtitles for all your video files and use the Properties dialog only if there are exceptions for particular subtitle tracks. Global Settings is also available for your preferred languages.

[Christopher]

The Subtitle Settings dialog can be used for converting or reformatting an existing external subtitle file. In some cases, the original subtitle file
may have syntax errors, or be the wrong format, or may be missing important tags, or the subtitle text is not ordered correctly. In these cases, Mezzmo and your devices may reject the subtitles and not display them at all or display them incorrectly.

Note: Mezzmo may reject external subtitle files and display errors like:

The subtitles items are not ordered properly on the timeline,
Subtitles may not work on some devices.
(Error: 141)
(L:9, C:0) “How are you?”

where ‘L’ indicate the text line, and ‘C’ the columns with the subtitle file.

Tip: Some XML based formats (for example: XAS, Mpg4, Timed Text) may be rejected by Mezzmo with syntax errors. You can try to load these XML/HTML files into your web browser such as Internet Explorer to get more detailed feedback about the syntax problems.

Subtitle files with errors should be manually edited to resolve the errors - otherwise some of the text items may be lost, misinterpreted or ignored by Mezzmo when processing subtitles.


Tip: Use the Convert Subtitles dialog to improve or modify the formatting of the original subtitle file.

[Christopher]

Mezzmo makes the process of configuring your subtitle settings easy by allowing you to preview your external subtitle files in the Subtitle Settings dialog:

1. Click Tools / Options to display the Options dialog and go to the Subtitles page.
2. Click the Global Settings button.
3. Click the Browse button and select a subtitle file from your video library.
4. Select the language for the subtitles.
5. Select the code page for the subtitles.
6. Select the font.
7. If the characters are not displayed correctly, then try a different code page or font
8. Choose the burning settings when Mezzmo burns your subtitles.
9. Click OK to save the settings.

Tip: Code pages used for popular languages:

1250 or 28592 for Czech, Hrvatski, Hungarian, Moldavian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Turkmen
1251 or 28595 for Belarusian, Bulgarian, Kirghiz, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian
1252 or 28591 for Danish, German, English, Spanish, Finnish, French, Indonesian, Italian, Nederlands, Portuguese
1253 or 28597 for Greek
1254 or 28599 for Turkish
1255 or 28598 for Hebrew
1256 or 28596 for Arabic, Persian
932 or 20932 for Japanese
936 or 950 for Chinese
949 or 50225 for Korean

[Christopher]

You can specify the subtitle settings for each of your preferred languages that you have specified in the Options dialog (Subtitles page).

1. Click Tools / Options to display the Options dialog and go to the Subtitles page.
2. Click the Add button, and add a new language to the “Preferred subtitle language” list.
3. Order the list of languages using Up and Down buttons.
4. Click the Settings button and specify subtitle settings for the selected language.
5. Repeat the settings for each of the preferred languages.

Mezzmo automatically recognizes the language of external subtitles when the external subtitle file contains a special suffix language code. For example:

• myvideo.avi - Video file
• myvideo.fr.srt - Subtitle file in French language
• myvideo.ger.srt - Subtitle file in German language
• myvideo.Spanish.srt - Subtitle file in Spanish language
• myvideo-fr-cd1.srt - Subtitle file in French language

Language identifiers that Mezzmo detects:

• two letters code, as ISO-639-1 standard, commonly used by HTML pages on Internet, examples: pl, fr, en,
• three letter code, as ISO-639-2 standard, examples: pol, fra, eng
• name of the language, examples: Polish, French, English
• two letter country code, as ISO-3166 standard, examples: pl, fr, uk, us

Some subtitle formats like Sami or VobSub may have special tags with language specifications. For all these files, Mezzmo will read these special tags and detect the language automatically. These formats may also have many subtitle tracks inside the one external subtitle file. Deleting the external subtitle file may actually remove many subtitle languages from the subtitle list of the video.

Tip: Use Properties dialog (Subtitles tab) for a video to manually specify the language for each subtitle track if the language has not been detected automatically by Mezzmo.

[Christopher]

Some users prefer to keep all subtitle files in a separate folder rather than alongside their video files.
Use the Options dialog (Subtitles / Advanced page) to specify the alternative subtitle folder:

1. Click Tools / Options to display the Options dialog and go to the Subtitles / Advanced page.
2. Click the Browse button next to “Additional folder containing external subtitle files” and choose the folder.
3. Click OK to save your changes.
4. Run Maintain Library to update your Mezzmo library.

Subtitle files stored in the alternative folder must follow the same file naming strategy to be “paired” with the video file name. For example:

D:\mymovies\myvideo.avi - Video file
C:\mysubtitles\myvideo.srt - SubRip subtitle file
C:\mysubtitles\myvideo.fr.sub - Subtitle file written in French language


Note: Make sure the alternative folder with subtitles is always available for reading, especially when the folder exists on a removable hard drive.

[Christopher]

There are many 1000’s of different devices that support DLNA/UPnP streaming and most of these devices are supported by Mezzmo. Mezzmo can support a wide variety of devices since it includes device profiles for these devices and automatically assigns a device profile to detected devices on your home network. Device profiles tell Mezzmo what video, music, photo and subtitle formats the device supports.

For subtitles, the device profile may require you to manually override its subtitle settings to better match your particular model. This often occurs when a device’s model has regional differences (e.g. models from North America, Europe, Australia, Asia, Japan). Regional differences include the subtitle languages that are supported, fonts that are supported and encodings / code pages that are supported..

To override the subtitle settings for a device, go to the Devices Settings dialog (Subtitles tab) for your device:

1. Click Media Server / Media Devices.
2. Select your device and click Edit to display the Device Settings dialog.
3. Go to the Subtitles tab to view and change all your device’s subtitle settings.

The Device Settings dialog (Subtitles page) lets you override the global subtitle settings from the Options dialog (Subtitles page) for these subtitle attributes:

• Streaming rules: External, Embedded, or Burn.
• Preferred subtitle languages

Tip: With Mezzmo, you can stream your preferred subtitle language of (say) English to all your devices in your home by setting the global subtitle language in the Options dialog. You can also have certain devices in your home stream a different preferred subtitle language of (say) French by setting this preferred language in the Device Settings dialog (Subtitles tab).


To change the language preference for a particular device:

1. Click the Edit button next to “Preferred subtitle language” .
2. Click the Add button to add more languages to the list.
3. Use the Up and Down buttons to change the language preference order.
4. Click OK to save your changes.

Device Settings

Note: To modify the subtitle settings for your device using the Device Settings dialog, you may need to read the the device’s manual or product web site to learn what kind of subtitle support that your device has. Also, try searching for your device model on the internet since there may be owner forums that can help you. Finally, you may just try to stream the movie with your subtitles to confirm that your new settings are working as expected.

Note: Support for displaying subtitles on a device can be different depending on how you play the video that has subtitles. For example, a device may or may not display subtitles when:

• playing the video by SMB direct access or by USB (i.e. not by UpnP or DLNA!)
• playing the video by streaming it using DLNA/UPnP (like Mezzmo server does)

For example: Western Digital TV Live Hub (WD TV Live Hub) media players display VobSub subtitles (two files: .IDX and .SUB) when playing a video by SMB or USB, but do not when playing the video via DLNA/UPnP.


Example: Owner’s Manual for a LG Network 3D Blu-ray Disc Player. Supported video containers and subtitles:



Corresponding Device settings in Mezzmo based on the above device requirements:

Supported video containers:

• Embedded: AVI *)
• External: empty (none of the containers have been excluded, in other words: external files are always working with supported video files).

Supported subtitle formats:

• Embedded: FFmpeg:xsub *)
• External: SubRip (srt), SAMI Caption (.smi), Advanced Substation Alpha (ass) SubStation Alpha (ssa), MicroDVD (sub,txt), SubViewer 1 (sub), SubViewer 2 (sub),TMPlayer (txt), TMPlayer Multiline (txt), DVD Subtitle System (txt)
• Encoding: 1252 Western Europe *)
• BOM no, as Unicode is not supported by this particular LG media device *)

*) These settings are based on our typical experience when streaming with LG Blu-ray players.



To adjust the subtitle settings for a particular device in Mezzmo, you need to answer the following questions:

A. Does the device support external and/or embedded subtitles?

Modify the streaming subtitle rules by changing the following checkboxes:

• Stream external subtitles
• Stream embedded subtitles
• Burn subtitles

Note: These streaming subtitle rules are in the order that Mezzmo chooses to stream subtitles – i.e. stream external subtitles first, then if not possible to try embedding, and finally if none of these options are available, then transcode the video with subtitles burned in.