For about 99% of the external subtitles I have, PMS does not show any of them as available.
I use the sub-zero plugin, which seems to work perfectly. My movies are each in their own folder. Local Media Assets is selected for all sources in settings. Each movie is a single file, and each subtitle file is a utf-8 file with the exact same filename as the movie, with the .lang.srt extension.
Even with all that, full library scans, metadata refreshes, nothing makes the external subtitles show up. I’ve tried rebuilding the database. I’ve tried creating a brand new library and moving one of the movies with its subtitle files to it. I’ve tried renaming/moving files around, rescanning everything every time. On very rare occasions, in some movies, I’ll see maybe one of the two external subtitles show up (i.e. I’ll have two external subtitle files for two languages, PMS will show one language on the fifth scan, like 1% of the time). Have not managed to get it to show any subtitles for any tv shows, same exact issue.
I’ve run out of things to look for. The files themselves work great wth VLC/Airflow/etc. What might be the problem, why are the subtitle files not recognized?
Move the file out of the folder, in Plex Web, goto the preplay page for that movie, make sure the sub is not shown. Return to the home page. Put the file back, go to the preplay again. Check for subtitle file. If it’s not there, get the PMS logs and attach those to your next comment.
Exception writing to /Users/Constantinos/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Media/localhost/8/fd919277864412e1a8571907b19a68749f469de.bundle/Contents/Subtitle Contributions/com.plexapp.agents.localmedia.xml
When PMS finds an external subtitle file, it will create a link to that file. Some how your PMS is having trouble accessing the file that stores that information, so it doesn’t get updated to list the subtitle. Potentially some sort of permission issue.
Edit - It’s not just this one file. It’s for multiple files so if it is a permission issue, it would be one of these folders and not the file itself.
Hi, I’m still trying to fix this issue to see if the subtitles start showing up, but it’s getting a bit complicated.
The application support Media folder is currently a symlink to a network share, which is probably where this mess started. The reason it’s like that is that my internal drive can’t fit it - the Media folder is currently over 250GB. I don’t remember it being this large when I first moved it (I think it was closer to 50GB), which is making me think there’s a lot of corrupt/orphaned files in there.
I’m in the process of moving it to a local, direct-attached storage. It’s taking a while since there’s hundreds of thousands of files in there. Once I’ve done that, is there a way to ‘rebuild’ these bundles for everything? So that it actively deletes any orphaned entries?
Plex will delete orphaned files when you “clean bundles”. If your media folder is that large, you might have the option enable to “create video preview thumbnails”. These take up a lot of space.
@cneophytou said:
Hi, I’m still trying to fix this issue to see if the subtitles start showing up, but it’s getting a bit complicated.
The application support Media folder is currently a symlink to a network share, which is probably where this mess started. The reason it’s like that is that my internal drive can’t fit it - the Media folder is currently over 250GB. I don’t remember it being this large when I first moved it (I think it was closer to 50GB), which is making me think there’s a lot of corrupt/orphaned files in there.
I’m in the process of moving it to a local, direct-attached storage. It’s taking a while since there’s hundreds of thousands of files in there. Once I’ve done that, is there a way to ‘rebuild’ these bundles for everything? So that it actively deletes any orphaned entries?
@“MovieFan.Plex” said:
Plex will delete orphaned files when you “clean bundles”.
Is that an option somewhere, or an automatic action that PMS does?
@“MovieFan.Plex” said:
If your media folder is that large, you might have the option enable to “create video preview thumbnails”. These take up a lot of space.
Very good catch, thank you. If I set this to ‘never’, they’ll get deleted? If not, how do I reclaim the space?
@“MovieFan.Plex” said:
“Clean bundles” is found under the 3 dots to the right of individual libraries or too the right of the main library heading.
The check box only affects new items. However, there should be a big red “delete” button right under that setting.
Ah, it’s under the main ‘Libraries’ heading, I don’t see it under individual libraries. I’ll start rebuilding everything and report back in a day or two… thanks for the help
Ok I have my metadata size down to 77G now, and started a full metadata scan for the library (seems like it’s the only way to get Plex to find the external srt files again).
However, for every asset now each external language shows up twice. So where I have:
Movie.mkv
Movie.el.srt
Movie.en.srt
I now see, under subtitles:
Greek - SRT External
English - SRT External
English - SRT External
Greek - SRT External
One of the ‘Greek’ ones works fine, the other is either entirely off sync (by multiple minutes), or for the wrong movie. This was when there was no subtitles available before the metadata rescan.
This is true for every movie I checked. How can I see which srt files it’s seeing as the second set?
I’m having the same issue, tried converting to UTF-8, adding .en., tried each supported format. Some work, some don’t. Anyone else? Only workaround is to remux the mkv with the subtitles.
Im also having a similar issue. Some of my series don’t have subtitles at all (srt is in the same folder), and other series have subtitles for a serie i dont even have on my libraries (the srt ain’t in the folder).
