Hey thanks for the details. I had the topic opened at one point and lost my tabs.
I can’t reproduce this using Plex for Mac-1.4.0.924, and PMS-1.18.2.2029
Given a properly named movie with only an external subtitle track in UTF-8 encoding,
External .SRT subs do not play on the ‘new’ Plex apps for either Win10 or Mac. Play fine on the ‘old’ Plex Media Player for Windows and Mac.
Tried with multiple movie files & .SRT file pairs. Embedded subtitles (in the .MKV file) seem to work fine on the ‘new’ Plex player but it straight up refuses to play any external .SRT files at all.
Setup:
SERVER:
Debian 10 PMS Version 1.18.6.2368
CLIENTS: (same network, direct play, latest versions as of today)
Win10 Pro:
‘new’ Plex app - 1.6.2.994-e05b79d6
‘old’ Plex Media Player - Version 4.24.1
macOS Catalina:
‘new’ Plex app 1.6.3.1009-57cf57c8
‘old’ Plex Media Player Version 4.24.1
Neither of the ‘new’ Plex apps on either macOS or Win10 will display any external .SRTs. Both of the ‘old’ Plex Media Player apps play them fine.
No apparent errors in the logs on the server or players, the subs just never show on the ‘new’ apps.
External subtitles should be working a-okay. This thread was opened at 1.3. At 1.5 we fixed all known subtitle bugs - except for DNS rebind protection blocking sidecar downloads.
Plex Media Server Logs_2020-04-19_02-30-34.zip (6.2 MB)
Server Version#: 1.19.1.2645
Player Version#:1.8.0.1159-67c4a549
I reinstalled the plex player and now the external subtitle show if it is pre-selected when I start the movie. However, if I change to a built into movie file subtitle then back again to the external the subtitle gets stuck on the built in subtitle
I reproduced the described issue with the movie Dolittle in the logs attached.
I have this too. What logs do you want @deactivated, where do I get them, and how do I get “clean” ones? Built-in subtitles work fine, “sidecar” or downloaded ones do not.
Your boogeyman of “DNS rebind protection” just demonstrates monumentally awful programming. That 90% of finding a server and playing movies works fine and it’s just “tiny” problems like not being able to trigger transcoding (causing a stupid “cannot communicate with server” error on Android/FireTV which can play other files perfectly) or play subtitles without having to use DNS to find the server first just shows how poorly written those sections of code are. I almost regret paying for a lifetime licence.
Logs.rar (334.5 KB)
What I did to reproduce: I started plex for windows, started Dolittle with external swedish subtitle (svenska)(the swedish subtitle is showing on screen as intended) and then switched to built-in english subtitle (this also works fine), then back to swedish again (this is ignored, the playback is stuck on english subtitle.
Same issue occures if a built-in subtitle is pre-selected when movie starts and u you try to swap to an external subtitle. It gets stuck on built-in subtitle.
I apologise if I offended, but you have to admit that having some features broken by this while the vast majority just work fine can be more than a little infuriating.
That the error messages are wildly unhelpful “error communicating with server” (wait what? I just played a different film fine so why can’t you communicate now?) and don’t mention anything about this protection being a potential problem nor give a hint how to fix it just enhances frustrations.
I tried everything at https://support.plex.tv/articles/206225077-how-to-use-secure-server-connections/ to no avail and finally stumbled upon your comment in this thread to manually set up DNS on the device itself (I had already done the router for other reasons) and voila! That worked, but that one hint is buried on the help page and sadly I apparently glossed over it.
This is a perfect storm of bad hardware (which I cannot afford to replace) combining with some odd software choices to create something that almost works perfectly except on those edge cases when it doesn’t, and at those moments it is amazingly unhelpful about why it doesn’t work.
Honestly, I love Plex, I love it enough to have paid for it. But ever so occasionally it is the bane of my existence.
I’m seeing Plex.log contain failures resolving the plex.direct url for the subtitles stream. I think that’s our boogeyman. The mystery to me is how the sidecars display once successfully.
2020-04-24T10:03:33.745 [ DEBUG ] [mpv] ffmpeg: Opening https://192-168-1-42.f88742bd68a84f669fbba2ea7109a6a0.plex.direct:32400/library/streams/251944?X-Plex-Token=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx&encoding=utf-8
2020-04-24T10:03:33.746 [ ERROR ] [mpv] ffmpeg: tcp: Failed to resolve hostname 192-168-1-42.f88742bd68a84f669fbba2ea7109a6a0.plex.direct: The name does not resolve for the supplied parameters
2020-04-24T10:03:33.746 [ ERROR ] [mpv] stream: Failed to open https://192-168-1-42.f88742bd68a84f669fbba2ea7109a6a0.plex.direct:32400/library/streams/251944?X-Plex-Token=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx&encoding=utf-8.
2020-04-24T10:03:33.746 [ ERROR ] [mpv] cplayer: Can not open external file https://192-168-1-42.f88742bd68a84f669fbba2ea7109a6a0.plex.direct:32400/library/streams/251944?X-Plex-
I believe this video lines up with your reproduction steps: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1imv_15W5ZC6hJhZRK7QQJkeDV2N2UaYl/view?usp=sharing. In it I’m able to hop back and forth between embedded PGS and sidecar SRT. Although, big caveat, my network allows plex.direct to resolve to a local IP. If I’m correct then the core stream switching is fine and we’re dealing with a more constrained issue.
We’re porting a change made for our other mpv players that improve name resolution behavior. I’ll share an alpha build here once it’s ready.
@mattssonsebastian will you please give the build below a try? It’s our 1.10 alpha release currently in QA. In this build we’ve made changes that should address the hostname resolution problems with sidecar subs.
I downloaded the official (i think, unless im signed up for beta updates) update as of today that was pending when I opened the plex app: Version 1.10.0.1208-daa6b641. Now it’s working! . When I created this topic people agreed on the issue so I had the idea that this was a general issue that everyone was experiencing and thus I got very dissappointed when there were no fix for half a year, concidering the time given and the magnitude of the issue. As it turns out it was kind of local. Faith is restored!
Thanks for the help @deactivated and I want to give a special thanks to @nibbles for helping me out early in the process.
I attach the logs from where it plays correctly here if you like to compare and maybe pinpoint the cause.Logs.rar (137.1 KB)
. When I created this topic people agreed on the issue so I had the idea that this was a general issue that everyone was experiencing and thus I got very dissappointed when there were no fix for half a year, concidering the time given and the magnitude of the issue. As it turns out it was kind of local. Faith is restored!