Subtitle position pushed up when multiple lines are displayed in quick succession

I noticed a weird behavior (bug?) for Infuse on Apple TV. (ver. 7.3.5, tvOS 15.3)

When two lines of subtitles are displayed in quick succession, the first line gets pushed up. The position looks like Infuse tries to fit two lines of subtitle on screen at once. Even though they are still displayed separately.

This leads to the pushed up line blocking more of the center view of the video.

Confirmed on VLC for PC that this is not the the default subtitle behavior and only really noticed it on Infuse.

More info after some testing:

  1. If I fast forward the video to around the timestamp of the pushed up subtitle, the lines actually display normally. However when the video resume from even 5 seconds earlier, Infuse seems to decide the line needs to get pushed up.

  2. I extracted the .ass subtitle from the video and can confirm that there are no special positioning for the affected lines. They all have the same margins.

  3. More interestingly, it appears that using the extracted subtitle avoids this issue even though it is the same subtitle as the embedded one.

Since you’ve extracted the subtitles, can you check to see if these 2 entries have overlapping time stamps?

Something like

Subtitle 1
Start: 00:01:01
End: 00:01:30

Subtitle 2
Start: 00:01:28
End: 00:01:35

Just checked the extracted subtitles, they don’t have overlapping timestamps.

The scene was very dialogue heavy and each line is spoken right after the previous one. For example:
line 1: 00:05:30.45 - 00:05:42.71
line 2: 00:05:42.71 - 00:05:57.82

However, there is only one instance of pushed up subtitle in this scene despite all lines are one after another in timestamps.

I have noticed this behavior for quite a while and only yesterday decided to check if it’s caused by Infuse and not by default. Also, I don’t remember seeing the pushed up line linger while the next line displays. Thus I believe all instances of pushed up subtitle do not have overlapping timestamps.

To add on my second “more info after testing” post:

For point 1, the line that gets pushed up is the same every time. The only time when the line does not get pushed up is as I mentioned in point 1. Depending on the video, there can be multiple lines being pushed up in one video but they are always the same lines.

As I mentioned in point 3, this bug only occurs when playing the video with the embedded subtitle. Unless the timestamps got changed during subtitle extraction, which I highly doubt, it seems that Infuse treat embedded and external subtitles differently.

not sure if this issue is low priority to look into. I don’t mind extracting subtitle as a temporary workaround but would love to see some updates on this since pushed up subtitle blocking center view can be annoying.

Can you upload the actual subtitle file, and let me know a few of the timestamps you are seeing this with?

uploaded and sent the info via email. Thanks for looking into this.

Hi James,

Were you able to reproduce the issue? I am still encountering this issue and can upload more subtitle files if needed.

Thanks.

I found another scenario where the subtitle gets pushed up even when using external subtitle:

This happened when there is another subtitle line for the background TV dialogue at the top of the screen. For some reason, this caused normal dialogues at the bottom of the screen to get pushed up.

I can confirm that the pushed up line does not have overlapping timestamp or special positioning compared to other bottom subtitle lines.

@james Let me know if you want me to upload this subtitle file since the bug can get reproduced even when the subtitle is external.

Btw, I am now on ver. 7.3.9.

I’m pumping this up because it’s still a problem today. Since I watch a lot of anime with subtitles (softsub) I see this behavior from time to time. All other players, VLC, MPC etc on PC or Plex on ATV do not show this behavior.