I’ve never read any opinion for or against embedded subtitles. Embedded subtitles have the advantage of being in sync and available. Sometimes when bazarr downloads subtitles they are out of sync or have ads.

Thanks y'all. Your replies helped me find things to read and think about, and subtitle formatting makes more sense to me now. I was stuck thinking of my question only in terms of the media player that I would be using.

I see two downsides :

• when the language is not tagged properly

• when the format is not accepted by all media players (ex: pgs and Plex)

I have literally zero knowledge on this, but somewhere in the jellyfin settings, it mentions embedded subtitles can sometimes cause transcoding. Not sure why.

Mostly when whatever is playing the file doesn't support them. in that case both jellyfin and Plex will bake the subtitles directly into the media so that it's part of the video, which requires it to transcode.

Some versions of Plex would lag and stutter and buffer terribly with embedded subtitles. For a long time I had a process automatically strip them all out of all my media files.

A couple months ago, I turned off that automatic process (Unmanic) and haven't seen the problem lately. Maybe they fixed it? I'm keeping Unmanic around and configured in case the problem comes back though.

It is nice having subtitles immediately available instead of having to search for them.

It was lurking Unmanic and Tdarr forums that prompted my question. I just couldn't wrap my head around the existence of the option to automate stripping out embedded subtitles. I blame my lack of imagination on the turkey coma.