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How to Play Videos With Subtitle From USB With PS4 Media Player?

How to Play Videos With Subtitle From USB With PS4 Media Player?

Camille Wesley No Comment
PlayStation

PS4 has its own internal media player, which can be downloaded simply by clicking the icon on your main PlayStation 4 menu screen. This has given users the opportunity this time round to play a lot of file formats, including the increasingly popular MKV container through USB stick. However, issue occurs that sometimes when playing videos on PS4 from USB, it doesn’t show subtitle. Why? And how to play video from USB with PS4 media player with subtitle?

play video on PS4 with subtitle

If you want to play video with subtitle on PS4 media player, there are two points that you have to pay attention to:

1. You have to have external subtitle files named the same as the media file, in the same director.

2. At the moment only external SRT files work, SUB/ASS/SSA/MKS files do not work.

Learn: PlayStation/Xbox FAQ: Everything You Need To Know About Game Consoles

When your subtitle and video files are in different directors, your PS4 media player can’t find it and read it. So make sure the director is right. As for subtitle format issue, you have two ways to solve it. One is to convert SUB/ASS/SSA/MKS to SRT subtitle for PS4 streaming while another way is to hard burn subtitle to video for PS4 then PS4 media player doesn’t need to read two files (subtitle and video files).

Method 1: Convert SUB/ASS/SSA/MKS to SRT subtitle for PS4

Method 2: Hard Burn Subtitle to video for PS4 Media Player

Method 1: Convert SUB/ASS/SSA/MKS to SRT subtitle for PS4

Here’s a quick guide to convert subtitle for PS4 media player on your way.

  1. Download and install mkvtoolnix.
  2. Download MKVExtractGUI-2, extract into the directory where you installed mkvtoolnix.
  3. Download  and install Aegisub.
  4. Run MKVExtractGUI-2, set the input file to your MKV file.
  5. Select the subtitle file, and click extract. If this file extracts as SRT, skip to step 8. If the file is not an SRT file, continue to step 6.
  6. Run Aegisub and open up your subtitle file.
  7. Go to File menu -> Export -> and export the subtitle file as an SRT to convert it.
  8. Place this file, named the same as your video file, on to your USB stick. You will have to place any video files in a folder on the USB stick in order for the PS4 to recognise them.
  9. On your PlayStation 4 go to Settings -> Accessibility -> Closed Captions -> Check “Display Closed Captions
  10. Load the Media Player and play a video, press the Options button on the controller, select CC, and turn on. This option will not show up if you skip step 9.
  11. Congratulations! Your subtitles should now display.

There are also some advanced options for the subtitles in the Closed Captions settings, so you can change how they look. I am hoping that Sony will update the media player soon to support embedded subtitles, and more fonts and options for the subtitles as they look a bit garish as the moment.

Method 2: Hard Burn Subtitle to video for PS4 Media Player

Hardcoding subtitles onto video
for PS4 media player means that the subtitle is attached to the video when you watch video on PS4 media player, you can directly see the subtitles without PS4 reading the subtitle files. The short of burning subtitle to video is that you can edit or turn off the subtitle any more.

 Pavtube Video Converter Ultimate <Mac version> was the best one I was able to test and know 100% it worked in hard burning subtitles to videos. It supports various video to input, another mean is that you can use it embed hard subtitle to MKV video, MP4 video, AVI video, FLV video, H.265 video, even Blu-ray/DVD video (unique feature comparing with competitors). You can learn them in the review and we would save words here.

Step 1: Run Pavtube Video Converter Ultimate and import your video videos to it by clicking the “Add video” icon or you can just drag and drop the video to the interface the app to input the video. You can add  MP4, AVI, FLV, etc video, needing to add subtitle, just import the video in.   

 

Step 2. Click “Edit” or the pencil icon  to switch to the editing interface, where you can find multiple editing functions and “Subtitle” is just one of them. Click the “Subtitle” tab and check the “Enable” box to allow you to add SRT/ASS/SSA subtitles to PS4 videos. Then Click “Browse” to find and import the downloaded SRT/ASS/SSA subtitles. 

 

Kindly note: Pavtube Video Converter Ultimate only supports SRT/ASS/SSA subtitles, and make sure that the subtitle file and your video files are kept in the same folder sharing the same name. If you want to change the output format while adding subtitle to MKV video, you can select “Format” and choose your desired format to output. 

Step 3. Go back to the main UI and click “Convert” to start hard burning SRT/ASS/SSA subtitles to videos for PS4 streaming. Just wait for several minutes, the process will ends and you will get videos with hard subtitles. 

How to Play Videos From USB With PS4 Media Player?

You can use a USB stick to play your favourite videos on PS4 media player, and here’s how.

  1. Your USB stick needs to be in FAT32 or exFAT (the latter didn’t work for me, and NTFS definitely won’t work). This means that 4GB+ files may be an issue so cut them down to size if need be.
  2. Windows 7/8 don’t make it easy to format your drives to FAT32, so you will have to download a third party piece of software here: FAT32Format
  3. FAT32Format will allow you to format the drive very quickly to FAT32.
  4. If this still doesn’t work, you may have to go for a full format.
    • Go to Start Menu -> Type CMD in Search Programs and Files, right-click to run as admin [Windows 7]
    • Right-click Start button -> Select Command Prompt (Admin) [Windows 8/8.1]
    • Type “format i: /FS:FAT32” without the quotes, where i is replaced with whatever the USB drive is, be sure to get the right drive.
    • Press enter and it should start formatting, but it will take a few hours depending on the size of the drive.
  5. Create a folder on the USB stick, and place all videos into this folder. It doesn’t need to be called PS4, just needs to be a folder, else you won’t see anything.
  6. Audio needs to be in a folder called Music.
  7. You can now go into the Media Player and select the USB stick from the list to watch your videos. Media Servers on your network will also be listed here i.e. Plex etc.

Supported file formats

  • MKV
    • Visual: H.264/MPEG-4 AVC High Profile Level4.2
    • Audio: MP3, AAC LC, AC-3 (Dolby Digital)
  • AVI
    • Visual: MPEG4 ASP, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC High Profile Level4.2
    • Audio: MP3, AAC LC, AC-3 (Dolby Digital)
  • MP4
    • Visual: H.264/MPEG-4 AVC High Profile Level4.2
    • Audio: AAC LC, AC-3 (Dolby Digital)
  • MPEG-2 TS
    • Visual: H.264/MPEG-4 AVC High Profile Level4.2, MPEG2 Visual
    • Audio: MP2 (MPEG2 Audio Layer 2), AAC LC, AC-3 (Dolby Digital)
  • AVCHD (.m2ts, .mts)

WMV is not supported yet, but this feature was added later on in the PS3’s lifecycle as there is a license issue. So this may be added in a future update. JPG, BMP and PNG photos are also supported.

What’s more, Pavtube Video Converter Utimate can convert PS4/PS3 unsupported video to PS4 playable video to play supported/unsupported video on PS4 from USB and NAS.It also can convert video as the same format with only changing its codec for PS4 such as H.265 codec MKV/MP4 to PS4/PS3. It supports transcode MKV, AVI, MP4, WMV, FLV, VRO, XAVC, MXF, TS, even Blu-ray and DVD to PS4/PS3 supported video. You can read the relevant guides below:

MKV to PS4 AVI to PS4 WMV to PS4
DVD to PS4 Blu-ray to PS4 ISO to PS4

Free download and install 
  

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