Anime and Chromecast

[SeijiSensei]

I spent a good hour or so last night poring over the options for streaming MKV files with embedded ASS subtitles with my Android phone and Google Chromecast device. As far as I can tell, this is still pretty much impossible. MXPlayer works well if I want to watch a show on my phone, but the developers have just never gotten it together to implement Chromecast. My efforts to use something like Localcast as an intermediary between MXPlayer and the Chromecast device have also been unsuccessful. I can cast the video and audio, but there are no subtitles. Other players like the one that comes with ES File Explorer are no better.

The suggested methods for getting around this problem all involve extracting the subtitles from the Matroska container and converting them to .srt or creating a hard-subbed version using something like ffmpeg. That's just too much effort, even though I could certainly write a bash script in Linux to do the conversions. I can watch all my collection on my computer connected to my TV. For the upstairs TV with Chromecast I'll have to rely on Crunchyroll which supports the protocol natively.

Have I missed something obvious? Or is it just the case that MKV+ASS+Chromecast is a bridge too far?