Allow Subtitles to Be Named Differently

Feature Suggestions
1

Is it possible for Plex to recognise subtitles other than those named with the year and language?

All my media is simply the name of the movie or the old: TV Series Title - S01E01 - Name of Episode.

This means, if I want Plex to recognise the subtitles locally, I have to physically go through and rename them all (I guess manually).

I looked at the Bazaar thing but it’s not hugely user friendly and most of the guides want it to connect to Sonaar and Radaar - which I don’t use.

Surely it wouldn’t be too much for Plex to check if there’s an SRT file named the same as the film or episode and use that subtitle?

Granted, it could get complicated if you have more than one language but I suspect that won’t be many users.

Perhaps a drop down box so Plex knows whether to use legacy (what we have now) or another naming scheme for subs?

2

If you name your subtitle but skip the language suffix… they should still show up inside Plex – just assigned as Unknown Language.

3

Can you give an example of how you have your files structured and named?
As long as the subtitle and video file are named exactly the same (excluding the extension obviously, and the language code as @tom80H mentioned), they should show up in Plex.

For instance on my test server where I have WandaVision, I have files named like such:

WandaVision - s01e01 - Episode 1 [1080p].eng.sdh.srt
WandaVision - s01e01 - Episode 1 [1080p].eng.srt
WandaVision - s01e01 - Episode 1 [1080p].mkv

This is how that shows up when I look at the subs from the web app (all the other subtitles are muxed in the MKV file):

image

Changing the subtitles to not include the language code so they are named as below, they appear like this:

WandaVision - s01e01 - Episode 1 [1080p].cc.srt
WandaVision - s01e01 - Episode 1 [1080p].srt

Note I had to change from using SDH to CC because SDH was being recognized as a language code.

image

As you can see, when I have them named without the language code (as I never had the year in the filename to begin with) they still show up but Plex just does not know which language they are.

Regarding renaming, there are tools out there that allow for mass renaming, such a FileBot (which is cross platform) or TinyMediaManager (also cross platform). Either of those should be able to assist you in renaming the subtitles and possibly your video files so that they match.

The implementation Plex has is fairly standard as even VLC uses that to auto pick up external subtitles and know what language they are.

-Shark2k

4

Movie files are named just as the movie:

Movies/Avatar/Avatar.mkv
Movies/Ant Man/Any Man.mkv

TV series are named similar to how you have yours but no extras above the name and title:

WandaVision - s01e01 - Episode 1.mkv
WandaVision - s01e02 - Episode 2.mkv
WandaVision - s01e03 - Episode 3.mkv

The subtitles are named exactly the same but have the SRT container instead of MKV.

Reading on the help pages, it suggests I need to have the year of the media and the EN letters for it to show, rather than it be optional.

5

adding year to movies/series is to help match the movies/series. not the subtitles.

the subtitles should be named the same as the movie/episode files, and as indicated above should show up as UNKNOWN.

if you want them to show as the actual language of the subtitle, then you need to add the applicable language code in between the filename and extension.

long story short, your subtitles should already be detected as UNKNOWN, and if they are not, then you possibly have some permissions issues (plex can’t read them), or some other issue.

6

2024 clean-up: works as described (see descriptions/assistance above)