I am using this plugin (or a version of it):
plugin.video.teliaplay (from @M89SE)
368543 (thread)
I’ve made some local changes to it for making it work for norwegian customers as well (the the very last post in forum thread above), but I dont think these changes affects the problem I am facing: Subtitles wont stay on for a live TV stream.
And I dont think this is a plugin-issue, but rather a Kodi issue (or Teliaplay-issue if they’re not following standards or whatever). I have tested Kodi 18, 19 and 20, on both Win10, Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 20.04.
The behaviour I see, is this:
- TV-stream starts normal, with subtitles enabled as it should. But after a short time, they disappear.
- Whenever I disable/reenable subtitles (pressing keyboard-shortcut “L“), they usually appear again, but disappear again after short time.
- If I seek (go back or forward) I see the same: They usually appear again, but disappear again after short time.
- Watching through a browser works, and I see that the subtitle is segmented (naturally, since its live TV).
And I’ve come to think that this may be some sort of timing issue. Or more correctly: A time-to-live-issue. When subtitles appear, they are on time – not delayed or too soon. But they are cut of early (the last subtitle line disappear before it should). And I guess that Kodi is now trying to download the next subtitle segment, which it’s not yet available. So it fails, and the result is no more subtitles on screen from now on.
- This also explains why subtitles sometimes dont come up again after pressing “L” to disable/reenable subtitles: Because if I do it too soon, the next segment is still not available.
Here is an example of manifest.mpd that is used:
itikuyoril (paste)
Note the two AdaptationSet’s (id 5 and 6), where the one with Role “caption” is for hard of hearing (texting both norwegian and foreign language) and Role “subtitle” is for everyone else (texting foreign language only). They both have the same issue.
And here is an example of a text segment (T3_t154437256167088.m4s) downloaded when testing with browser:
uwehilenis (paste)
Running a simple base64-decode reveals two subtitle lines in it. Which means that text segments must be requested and downloaded often.
Is this a Kodi-bug? Or is there a property or something that must be set in ListItem to fix this?