What is jellyfin-plugin-subtitleocr?

This is a plugin for Jellyfin, a self hosted media server, that solves a specific problem: some movies and TV shows have subtitles that are actually pictures of text rather than text you can search or edit, a format used on DVDs and Blu-rays. This plugin reads those picture based subtitles and converts them into normal text subtitle files, either the common SRT format or the ASS format, so they behave like any other subtitle track. It does this using its own pattern matching approach rather than relying on a general purpose text recognition tool like Tesseract, and it needs no extra native software installed since it is written entirely in managed code. The database it uses to recognize letters is compatible with the one used by a separate, well known subtitle tool called Subtitle Edit, so a database someone has already trained or corrected in that program's interface can be reused here directly. To pull the subtitle tracks out of a video file in the first place, the plugin relies on ffprobe and ffmpeg, which Jellyfin already includes, rather than bundling its own copy. The plugin is currently labeled beta. According to the README, its core logic has been tested and its Jellyfin integration has been run against a real server managing a library of fourteen thousand items. It automatically figures out whether a subtitle should be exported as SRT or ASS depending on whether the original needs special positioning or color, detects light-on-dark versus dark-on-light text automatically per track, and never overwrites your original or hand made subtitles because its output always gets its own distinct filename. It also applies some conservative text corrections, such as fixing commonly confused letters, and can optionally run a spell checker. It is installed like most Jellyfin plugins: either by adding the project's plugin repository URL inside Jellyfin's dashboard and installing Subtitle OCR from the catalog, or by downloading the release file manually and placing it in Jellyfin's plugins folder. It is released under the MIT license, and its README notes the version of Jellyfin it currently targets.