Bug: Apple TV ios 26 no subtitles with Direct Play

Plex Players Streaming Devices
1

Server Version#: 1.42.2.10156
Player Version#: 8.45 (9684)
<If providing server logs please do NOT turn on verbose logging, only debug logging should be enabled>

Subtitles (external ASS or SRT) no longer show when Direct Play is enabled in the app. This since update to tvOS 26.0.1 (23J362). Apparently this is a known bug according to chatgpt:

Starting from tvOS 18 (iOS 26), Apple changed how external subtitles are handled during Direct Play — Plex’s tvOS app now sometimes fails to render external .srt (and other text-based) subtitles when the stream is direct-played (especially from remote servers). The Plex dashboard misleadingly reports “Subtitles (Direct Play)” even though nothing is displayed on screen.

Why is this nowhere mentioned by plex themselves? And when is this going to be addressed?

Switching off direct play in the app brings back the subtitles - prefer Direct Play as a higher quality and used to work fine before.

2

Same here, it has been happening for a few months. Opensubtitles sub search works, and the subs from that display ok. I changed the “Burn subtitles” option to “Always” on iOS, and it works, but it should not need to be like this.