FAQ's

Does Playback support subtitles?

Not for now.

Neither the Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 have native support for SRT/SUB files. In fact, there's no support for SRT/SUB files in the UPnP/DLNA specification itself. Other media servers may support subtitles by transcoding your video files into MPEG-2 for the Playstation and possibly WMV for the Xbox 360. Those are the only formats for which the PS3/Xbox will display subtitles.

Playback doesn't support transcoding and there are no plans to do so. Even if you put aside the legal concerns, transcoding is a very messy and inefficient process. You're telling the media player you have the entire file (you have to fabricate a fake file size just to get things started with the PS3/Xbox) when in reality you're converting it on the fly.

Since Playback is a commercial product, we can't just drop in mencoder or ffmpeg due to licensing issues.

As for MKV files, Playback can repackage them into MP4 files that will stream to both the PS3 and Xbox. Just select "Convert MKV Files..." from the File menu. The process only takes about two minutes for a 1-2GB MKV file.

But I don't have a PS3/Xbox and my device supports subtitles. Why can't I see my subtitles?

Some devices do support subtitles over Samba. However, it's unlikely that they support them via UPnP/DLNA since there's no provision in the DLNA specification for communicating the presence/location of external subtitle files.

We would love to support SRT/SUB files but this isn't something that's under our control. For this to work, both the client device and the server (Playback) would have to be on the same page. If the client device isn't looking for SRT/SUB files in UPnP mode, there's no way for us to send them.

When it becomes possible to add subtitle support efficiently and reliably, Playback will offer it.