There are two ways of provide forced subtitles; 1º include a separate subtitle with just the forced captions and 2º use the full subtitle, containing all the captions, but read the forced flag of individual captions.
Plex works well with the 1º but 2º is not supported, there are blurays that comes with separate forced subtitle but others, for instance, like Game of Thrones, only includes one subtitle but with forced flag on individual captions, and indeed I think this is a more elegant solution, why duplicate things if you can just flag the forced ones.
Even if the subtitle file is not flagged as default, the fallback should be to use the desire default language for media selected in preferences to find the corresponding subtitle file and read the internal forced flags and show them, of course, this behavior doesn’t apply if there any dedicated forced subtitle file.
Kodi works in that way and will be great if Plex implement a forced subtitles strategy in the same way.
That should work for all subtitle format supporte forced flag in individual captios, SRT, PGS, don’t know if all subtitle formas supports that feature, but SRT and PGS are essential to support.
Are you talking about forced narrative subtitles? These are not SRT and PGS files. They are special files made from those. You are correct that Plex does not support these type of subtitles.
AFAIK, this use case is a specialty only in Blurays.
You only need to extract the forced lines from the full subtitle.
If you rip the Bluray or DVD with makemkv, this is already done automatically.
For all other cases, you can use software like Subtitle Edit, which allows you to extract only the ‘forced’ lines.
If you could send me one such subtitle file (ZIPped please), I can write up a HowTo article.
Not sure if that’s the name, what I mean instead of have a separated subtitle track with the forced subtitles on it and the MKV forced flag set to the track, just keep the forced flags of individual captions that comes in the subtitle track. Maybe is what you say, dunno, anyway I think is a more compact and elegant way of handle forced captions.
Yes, you are right I double check with SRT on Subtitle Edit and you can set forced flags for individual captions but on PGS you can.
Thanks, don’t worry I’m familiarized with all the tools, and yes, MakeMKV can extract them for you, but as I said I find more elegant and compact just use one subtitule track and let the player use the already flagged captions in it to show them. That’s how Kodi does and I think is a more complete solution than the other, also bluray players works on that way, so somehow is a standarized (makes sense) way of do it.
So, is there any chance this can be implemented? Kodi does it in that way for PGS subtitles, like any bluray player would do, and since Plex support PGS subtitles it makes sense it would supported as well.
I hope it will never be implemented. This feature will turn transcoding on as PGS is not supported. If you have 4K movies it will be a huge problem. So no, please DO NOT IMPLEMENT THIS.
On an older version of Kodi, forced subtitles are extracted from the main subtitle track, whereas this is not the case on the latest version of Plex!
This requires adding a specific track for forced subtitles with Plex
