A direct-played file's own subtitle stream (WebKit lists an mp4's mov_text) was switched to hidden and drawn under any choice, Off included: only the player's <track> is kept hidden and read, other subtitle tracks are switched off. The lift was measured in screen pixels and applied inside the x1.25 windowed player, and re-measured off a box carrying its own (or a mid-slide) transform: an untransformed outer box is measured, the distance divided by the scale, and a cue that just appeared is placed, not slid from where the last one was left.
hls.js emptied the cues of every text track on the element when a manifest
loaded or the media attached, our own <track> included, so a VTT that loaded
first showed nothing for the session; its subtitle and caption controllers are
no longer built. A remounted default <track> was switched to showing by the
browser after the hide had run, drawing the cues natively under ours; the hide
now follows every added track and mode change.
On an iPad the bar covered the text whenever it was up: the browser places a
native cue by its line, which nothing animates. The track now stays loaded as
hidden and PlexSubtitles draws the active cues, measured against the bar and
lifted above it in 200 ms, back down when it hides. The viewer's size, colour,
background and outline settings style the text directly. Also fixes a test
typing slip from the search pill change.
- The engine tracks the request out per item: A, then B, then back to A sent a second request
for A beside the one still out.
- A hardware transcode superseded during its fallback answered with the NEWER session; the losing
request's player then stopped it as stale. It now answers with its own (dead) session.
- A replaced hls.js instance's late manifest no longer marks the player ready or plays the
outgoing media.
- A pause given after the answer stands: the manifest and the first canplay read the live intent.
- The debounced A/V-offset restart is dropped on an item change instead of restarting the
previous item under the next one's title.
PlexPlayer's session logic (generation, pending play intent, clock ownership, session offset, reclaim
budget, listener teardown) moves into lib/hlsEngine.ts, a plain class with hls.js behind lib/hlsPort.ts
and its own unit tests.
- A seek, track change or reclaim asked for while a session request is out replaces the queued
target; it is sent once the in-flight answer settles. A burst of 20 presses past the buffer was 20
requests and 20 ffmpeg spawns; it is now 2-3, and plays again ~2 s sooner.
- The player stops its server session when it leaves the item, closes or the page unloads
(POST /api/plex/stream/{rk}/session/{sid}/stop, identity-aware). A left transcode used to run to
the end of the film first.
- A restart asked for after a new session attached but before it played no longer reads the emptied
media as the viewer's pause.
eslint now also enforces:
- the React Compiler diagnostics that `recommended` leaves out (todo,
memo-dependencies and ten zero-hit tripwires);
- a description on every suppression, and no blanket disables;
- no focused or skipped tests (vitest and playwright);
- the typed pair no-floating-promises and no-deprecated.
Lint also covers e2e/ and the TypeScript build configs, which `eslint .`
had been skipping in silence.
Every hit is fixed or suppressed inline with a named reason:
- The 31 try statements the compiler cannot lower yet carry a suppression
until S3 rewrites them. Five other compiler skips were plain fixes:
a module counter bumped inside a hook, a ref read in a default
parameter, and a local named like the <section> it renders.
- The real defects behind floating promises are fixed. ChatDock threw at
nobody when the device key store could not be opened. VideoEditor's
play() rejection went unhandled. loadYouTubeApi never rejected, so a
blocked IFrame API left the player on an empty stage forever; it now
fails on a script error or after 15 s, shows its own error with the
way out, and lets the next open try again.
- MutableRefObject, FormEvent and lucide's deprecated brand icon are
replaced. The YouTube glyph now lives in lib/brandIcons.
- The lint-probe harness lets its virtual file names into TypeScript's
default project, so the contract tests still run the real config.
Ten more suppressions, and React 19 turns out to supply the missing primitive.
useEffectEvent (stable since React 19.2, which S1 brought in) is the canonical answer to the
"bind the listener once, but read the latest values" pattern these hooks were disabling the
checker for. Three of playerModalHooks' four escape hatches become honest dep lists: the
wheel-volume handler, the native-controls handover, and the fullscreen-change sync. The
contract is no longer prose — the compiler enforces it.
The fourth stays, deliberately, and now says why at the site: the YouTube player's lifecycle
effect must run once per video (re-running destroys and rebuilds the iframe), and YT.Player
takes its callbacks as an object literal, which an effect event may not be passed into.
Fixed, not suppressed:
- useDismiss captured onClose when the popover opened, so a caller that re-rendered with a
different handler while it stayed open kept getting the OLD one called. The disabled dep list
asserted the opposite ("read fresh from this run's closure"). Both the handler and the ref
list are read through refs now; three tests, the two that matter mutation-checked.
- usePref wrapped its seed in a useCallback whose dep list had to be excused. useState calls a
lazy initializer exactly once, so the memo was saving nothing; inlined.
- useCardPager clamped an out-of-range page from an effect. Adjusted during render instead —
React discards that pass rather than committing it, so no out-of-range page is ever painted.
- plexPlayerHooks' auto-skip countdown reads its marker from the ref that already existed, so
the dep list names its real inputs. That also made the set-state-in-effect finding go away:
the progress is genuinely timer-driven, and the checker can now see that.
- useUrlMirror and useChipOverflowFit only needed their stable refs listed.
Two test-harness suppressions (a render-phase probe ref, a module-level setState handle) moved
inline with the reason they exist: both exist to observe a hook from outside without changing
what is being measured.
Suppressions 99 -> 89; exhaustive-deps 35 -> 27.
A full pass that ran out of time kept what it reached, but its retry an hour
later started again at 0, so a file too big to read inside the extraction
timeout never completed. The pass now starts where every embedded track's
coverage from the head ends (less the window pre-roll, so a cue across the
join is read whole). The seek needs -avoid_negative_ts on this read as on a
window, measured on a real file: without it the cue running at the start
shifts the whole output.
A partial track whose full pass had failed never reached a settled state, so
the player polled it every 2 s for the rest of the film. The status now says
whether the track is still growing, and a stalled one is polled every 15 s —
still inside the 60 s lookahead that reads the next window before an edge.
Deep-review round 3 of bug hunt 2026-09.
- `failed` is now final only for a track that can never be text (bitmap, no item/track/file). A Plex
hiccup or a stretch ffmpeg could not read answers `unavailable`: said, polled again every 5 s, and
the <track> stays mounted when cues exist elsewhere (gen > 0). Re-picking the selected track asks
the server again at once.
- Within LOOKAHEAD_S of a covered stretch's end the next window is read ahead, instead of only once
the playhead has fallen off it (subtitles dropped out at every edge while the full pass was backed
off or slower than a window lasts).
- Windows and full passes run on separate pools with separate in-flight caps, so a window never
queues behind (or is refused by) minute-long full passes — the pool comment promised that and
nothing enforced it.
- A pass that times out is TERMinated and keeps what it reached (published as partial) instead of
being killed and discarded.
- Lapsed failure memos are swept on every write (they were only pruned when the same key was read
again, so polling fresh keys grew the process without bound).
- `publish` no longer merges into a sidecar with no VTT behind it, or claims a region whose VTT write
failed, or overwrites an unreadable track with one window.
- A NUL in a rating_key names no row (it was a DataError, a 500, on every Plex route) and no longer
500s the status poll.
Tests: 16 new, each mutation-checked (18 mutations, all red on the test that names them).
- The <track>'s `error` never reached `onSubTrackError`: it does not bubble, and React 18 attaches no
listener of its own to a <track> (measured in Chrome and jsdom — `onError` 0 calls, `onErrorCapture`
1). Round 1's remount-and-give-up was dead code behind it. The hook now hands the player
`onErrorCapture`, and the test fires a real non-bubbling `error` at a rendered <track>.
- Once reachable, the retry burned its whole budget within milliseconds of an outage (a remount
fetches at once) and the give-up outlived turning subtitles off and on. Retries now wait (2 s,
doubling), running out is reported at once, and picking the track again starts a fresh budget.
- Until the first timeupdate the poll sent `sessionK` — still 0 while the session request was out,
and the PREVIOUS item's start after a move to the next episode. It now sends where the session was
asked to start, and the track choice belongs to the item it was made for, so the next item is not
asked about the old ordinal at the old position.
- A failing poll over a stale `partial` answer was silent: react-query keeps the last good data, the
track stayed "showable", and the notice only rendered for an unmounted track. The hook now decides
what the player says (`subNotice`), independently of whether a window is mounted.
Deep-review R2, plus one defect found while verifying it on localdev.
- The status poll re-armed every second after a FAILED request: `data` stays empty on an error,
so it read as "still preparing" for as long as the player was open — and the request was not
quiet, so a persistent 500 re-opened the global error dialog every second. It now backs off to
10 s (a blip still heals on its own) and is quiet; the player already shows the failure inline.
- A <track> whose own VTT fetch failed never fetched again: with the server's answer unchanged its
key was unchanged, so React kept the dead element — silently blank subtitles. The key (now built
in the hook, where it is tested) carries a failed-load count; after two remounts the track is
reported as unavailable instead.
- Found in UAT: until the first timeupdate `abs` is 0, so after a resume every poll said at=0 and
the first window was cut around the head of the film (a resume at 20:00 polled at=0 for as long
as it stayed paused). The poll reports the session's start until playback ticks. And the window's
dedup identity is the track plus a window-length bucket of its start — keyed on the track alone
(R1), the right window queued behind that wrong one.
The poll's start/stop rules finally have tests (every earlier one resolved a single fixed answer).
Verified on localdev against Westworld S1E6 resumed at 20:00: the polls carried at=1197, one
subtitle line on screen at 21:02, the poll stopped at `ready`; the real file's window (56 cues) +
full pass (608) merged to 608 — the old merge would have served 664. 11 mutations, all red.
Bug hunt 2026-09, items 8 and 12 — the two things the Plex player was measurably
lying about.
Item 8: picking a subtitle track showed nothing for a long time, and the reported
workaround was to stop/start until it suddenly worked. Measured on prod against a
17.06 GB MKV with two embedded SubRip tracks:
full pass, one track 154 s
full pass, both tracks in ONE run 111 s
-c:s copy (no WebVTT conversion) 143 s
from 1:00:00 to the end of file 66 s
a 630 s window at 1:00:00, both 8 s
So the conversion was never the cost: ffmpeg streams every byte of the container
between its seek point and its stop point, and the array delivers ~140 MB/s. The
only lever is reading less. Three changes follow from that:
* a window around the playhead is extracted and published FIRST (seconds), and
the full pass completes behind it;
* every embedded text track rides that same single read — picking Hungarian used
to cost a full pass and then switching to English cost another one;
* none of it happens inside a request any more. The endpoint answers 202 while a
background worker extracts, the player polls /status (carrying its position, so
the window follows the viewer), and one ffmpeg run finally has a timeout.
-copyts is deliberately absent from a windowed pass: with it ffmpeg ignores -t and
reads the whole container anyway (measured — a [0, 600 s] window still took the
full 145 s), so a window comes back on a zero-based clock and is shifted to
absolute time here. Cached tracks written by older builds have no coverage sidecar
and count as complete, so nothing is re-extracted after the upgrade.
The <track> is no longer mounted before the server has something to put in it; a
"Preparing subtitles: …" notice stands in, and a track that can never be shown says
why instead of leaving the viewer to conclude the picker does nothing.
Item 12: "Bitrate" read a constant 211 kbps on every remux, because it was the
master playlist's BANDWIDTH — which ffmpeg derives from the one stream whose rate
it knows, the -b:a 192k AAC track, plus 10%. It is a measurement now: bytes per
second of MEDIA from hls.js FRAG_LOADED, accumulated per fragment type and summed
(a multi-audio session's video and audio renditions cover the same media seconds,
so pooling them would report half the truth), and an honest dash until the first
fragment lands. The panel also finally names the audio and subtitle track in play.
Verified in the browser against the real Plex library, and every new test
mutation-checked.
peter