Currently there is no way to tell plex to always select forced subtitles in the preferred subtitle language even when preferred audio is available and not select any subtitles if there is no forced track.
My use case is:
Forced subtitles are ones that should always be displayed if they exist unless another subtitle track is being selected instead. (as the other track should contain the text in the forced one)
So I have anime and I watch it in English and have that selected as my preferred language for both audio and subtitles. Some anime has signs tracks and some do not. Some movies have foreign language tracks some do not. However almost all of my content has some form of subtitle track in my language. For anime it may be simple dialogue, where for movies it may be SDH. I created a script that uses MKVPropEdit.exe to set all signs and foreign language tracks to forced. I did this thinking if I used the Audio/Subtitle preferences for my account in the plex client to only allow forced tracks it would function as I intended.
However, I now found that the settings for “FORCED SUBTITLE SEARCHES” only functions when using the “More” feature when manually selecting a subtitle track. (This was found in the guide Account Audio/Subtitle Language Settings | Plex Support )
Although it does seem that plex is honoring in some way my forced setting as when I have multiple subtitle tracks and one is forced it will prefer the forced one. But when there is no forced track, it will select the first available track in my preferred language.
If not already clear my suggestion is to allow the user to display forced tracks when they are available in their preferred language but not display any other subtitle tracks when there are no forced tracks in their preferred language.
I only need subtitles in 2 cases:
- There is no audio in my language.
- These is audio in my language but there are other languages spoken that are not in my language. (Like aliens on Star Wars)
Below are my audio &subtitle settings.
