Allow enabling of Media3 "Legacy Text Decoding"

Feature Requests
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1

I confirm this is a Feature Request and NOT a support/technical query. Please use your Bitmovin Dashboard for raising support tickets.

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Player

Description

In Media3 version 1.4.0-alpha02, Google changed the way Text track Decoding/Rendering works. Depending on the Subtitle encoding, ExoPlayer is sometimes unable to show the subtitle text due to this new method.

Google provided a method of switching back to the Legacy method of Subtitle decoding/rendering if the user wants.

Please consider exposing this Media3 setting in the Bitmovin Player so that we can switch back to using the Legacy Text Decoding.

Details can be seen in the release notes here: Release 1.4.0-alpha02 · androidx/media · GitHub

2

Hi @jwatson

Firstly, thanks for joining and contributing to the Bitmovin Community!

Thanks for raising this request. It’s not currently on our roadmap, but we’ll continue to monitor interest in adding this option to revert back to the legacy text decoding and let you know if it’s something we look to add in.

A short term option could be to raise a support request to assess your affected streams to see if there’s some workaround we can suggest in the meantime?

Thanks,
Jacob

3

Hi @jacob.arends , my apologies for the delayed reply. I have a stream URL here for you, any suggestions would be great

https://dvr-01-ballysports.akamaized.net/AdSegmentFilter/cue/aHR0cHM6Ly92b2QtMDEtYmFsbHlzcG9ydHMuYWthbWFpemVkLm5ldC9Db250ZW50L0RBU0gvTExDVS9jbTg1aWw0bDkwMGFsanV2a3JqbnNicDR4L21hbmlmZXN0Lm1wZA==?did=7b4be74e-f2ee-4cd0-b1a2-e99d1a6f3273&debug=false&lmt=0&app_bundle=com.foxsports.videogo.hg&app_store_url=market%253A%252F%252Fdetails%253Fid%253Dcom.foxsports.videogo.hg&platform=android&osversion=35&device_model=Pixel+8+Pro&device_make=Google&appversion=8.0.12&favteams=583ecb8f-fb46-11e1-82cb-f4ce4684ea4c%2C583ed157-fb46-11e1-82cb-f4ce4684ea4c%2C80715d0d-0d2a-450f-a970-1b9a3b18c7e7&sessid=1dbc04ca-fb9c-4108-aac9-0460164dea1e&subid=auth0%7C6509c933e7f153a1338141e2&materialid=100130146&broadcast=Foul+Territory&episode=Foul+Territory&mvpd=bally&zip=55301&rsn=spso&region=Southeast&mvpduserid=&islive=false&category=MLB&isfavteam=false&app_name=Bally+Sports&ttd_uid2=A4AAABBWUv49qATkntzQCtV7u-XCaH1Oz73-WgIQpS-qixhZQMi-zdokHrShbLbCy01l2gBK7DLc6k19W8XoWc7tbPvfSPf8eDHeV8MEc2uTa1UJx3MFOz3V3XbF8NbCKJsLMwvrFKg41rex5N0rJYS8E23Seb4xPddusFFUTky__BdGEBFbyMJAkau28giOwIhUr3bK6Ll5Y0KKEcXCi63hWw

4

Hi @jwatson

Thanks for the stream.

We also noticed that Google now deprecated the experimentalSetLegacyDecodingEnabled flag, so we’d definitely suggest just looking at the stream as part of a support ticket to see if there’s anything specific that can be worked around.

Can you please open a support ticket via the Bitmovin Dashboard with the details from this thread?

Thanks,
Jacob

5

Thanks Jacob. I’ve opened the ticket here. Hope to hear some ideas from yall soon

https://bitmovin.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/25056

6

Hi @jwatson!

I have some good news for you. With the release (3.107.0) we added a new tweak config that enables you to switch back to the legacy parsing method. You can set parseSubtitlesDuringExtraction config to false to achieve that.

7

This is good to know, thank you.

We have also found a fix in our subtitle formatting which we will attempt to get into production soon, since the “legacy text rendering” is deprecated.

Thanks for your help everyone!

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