Ok, I feel like Charlie Brown and every time I think I’ve figured out how to set up subtitles Lucy pulls the ball away just as I’m about to kick it!.. AARG!
I’ve watched several YouTube videos on how to set up subtitles… none worked. I’ve read the articles here about setting up subtitles and thought I had it figured out but apparently I don’t.
Now, I guess I’ll use my “Phone-A-Friend” lifeline and ask for help here.
Can anyone tell me how to get subtitles to work? I don’t want subtitles for all movies just during the parts of a movie where someone is speaking in a language other than English like in ‘French Kiss’ when somebody is speaking in French or in ‘Game of Thrones’ when someone is speaking Dothraki.
Hi Rene-House
The easy way is to use normal subtitle files (*.srt), give them the same name as your movie, a_b c.mp4 + a_b c.en.srt, where .en stands for English, the subtitle language shown in Plex, and place them in the same folder.
More complicated way is to merge those subtitles into your video, you can find tutorials on YouTube, if you want to keep your amount of files in the library as low as possible.
The descriptions/instructions are quite misleading for the novice. There is no magic button to press wherin you get the English text when somebody is speaking German, for instance. Those lines of text are contained in a subtitle called a Forced Subtitle - Forced on your language selection cause you need 'em to be on.
Now, then - finding them is another can of worms.
Good Luck.
I have pretty good luck myself at one or more of these places:
etc - google if you want more.
Now - the naming - If not embedded into MKV files (my favorite):
The Movie (YEAR).xxx <---the audio track is flagged 'English'
The Movie (YEAR).eng.forced.srt <---auto selected - if setup and flags are correct
The Movie (YEAR).eng.srt <---not auto selected when a forced sub is available, but can be selected manually
Apart from the ‘Flags’ - the sub must be named exactly like the movie - and if you expect Plex to work properly in it’s auto selection routines - you MUST tag your audio/video tracks with a language - as well as any subtitle tracks, or files.
That pretty much covers it.
Except the part about having LMA Enabled - but NOT in priority:
The moral of the story is - when ripping/acquiring be sure to rip/acquire the forced sub tracks/files and name them accordingly. When ripping, a sub track or file with many elements is probably the full subs. The track or file with few elements is probably the forced subs. You rip 'em out of there and look at 'em to be sure.
Use the naming shown by Juice. Plex will pick it by default. Note that Plex remembers subtitle selections for a given movie. So, if you turn it off, or select a different subtitle, Plex will remember that choice the next time you play the movie.
Also, be aware that with Plex Smart TV apps (Samsung/LG) and AndroidTV apps, if the audio is transcoding and you enable subtitles, then the video also transcodes. This will be especially apparent on HDR movies, as Plex transcodes HDR to SDR. To tell if the video or audio is transcoding, monitor playback status via the Plex Dashboard.
That’s not true in Plex in the literal sense. The name ‘forced’ comes historically from DVD. There, ‘forced’ subtitles were automatically activated, without user intervention.
Plex does this a bit differently. Not least because one Plex server can deliver media to several users. Of which each one can have different language preferences.
You should really replace the term ‘forced subtitles’ in your head by ‘subtitles for foreign-language parts and signs’. (but that is of course unwieldy, so ‘forced’ is generally used)
Yes. In your user account activate ‘Automatic track selection’
If your native language is English, set both
Audio Language and Subtitle Language to English
Set Subtitle Mode to ‘Shown with foreign audio’
The rules for external subtitles in tv shows are the same as in movies:
same file name as the video file (that includes upper-lower casing!)
except for the file name extension which can additionally contain the language code and the ‘forced’ attribute.
One more thing to check (there’s always one more thing…).
Make sure the SRT files are UTF-8. If they’re not, lines with some special characters, such as musical notes, may not appear. Example: ♪ The hills are alive ♪
This is really easy. Open the SRT file in Notepad++. Encoding is displayed in bottom right corner. If not UTF-8, select all (ctrl A), select Encoding -> UTF-8, save. Done.
If the SRT files have clumsily added advertisements (sometimes in totally different text encodings – you know who is doing that), they might explode in your face.
Better get Subtitle Edit and let it check and repair your files.
Also quite handy to make the subtitles sync in perfection.
… and if getting these subs from online sources - not extracting them from the media file - syncing is something you will become very good at (and don’t worry, it’s easy) with Subtitle Edit.
