Trying to get captions to work on video streamed from network media server to smart tv

May 9, 2018
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I bought a Samsung UN55MU6290FXZA smart tv a few months ago and love it. However, I stream a lot of movies and shows from my home network media server (just using Windows 10 Media Player) straight to the tv, and the only file format that displays captions or subtitles is .mkv. No .mp4 or .avi files will show them. My wife and I have bad hearing so we pretty much rely on the captions.

With the .mkv files, at first I thought the captions were being read from an .srt file in the same directory as the video, which is what a million forums say you have to do to get the captions to show, but then the other day I played a movie from a directory WITHOUT an .srt file, yet captions were displaying!

Conversely there are occasionally video files I play that don't show captions regardless of having an .srt file in the directory, or what the name of the .srt file is (like named exactly the same as the video file or named "English" or anything). The captions just don't display at all.

This tells me the .mkv videos that show captions actually have the captions embedded in the video files. So how can I get the .mkv (or any other video file format for that matter) to display the captions??? I've scanned through forums and contacted Samsung and everyone says the same thing: "the caption file must be named the same as the video file and located in the same directory." But that doesn't work.

Please help!!

p.s. - if there is no solution to this, am I forced to having to use a media server application like Plex or UMS that has to mux the video and captions?
 
May 9, 2018
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So after posting this, I came across some other posts where it is simply stated that DLNA does not support external captions. Now for the quest to find a way around that....