Server Version#: 1.42.2.10156
Player Version#: 2025.26.0 (1272)
None of my external subtitles are working AGAIN. I already had to re-encode all subtitles from my library to UTF-8 just because Plex Team wanted it to, and now what? What other special format or peculiarity do I have to fix just to make the app work as it should? As a paying customer, I’m really getting tired of you guys breaking things that weren’t broken in the first place.
This is not helpful at all, you need to actually describe the problem. But externals subtitles broke for me too since 1.42.1.10060. I have Automatically select audio and subtitle tracks enabled and now it prefers the full internal PGS over the forced external SRT.
Besides all my configurations I mentioned, I explained the exact problem, what else should I add here? I am also using external SRT files, does your SRT files are even working?
Same issue in 1.43.0.10162. External SRT is broken. It works if burned in before playing, but if external, it fails to start the transcoder.
External subs work for me. What is is your server os, and which client are you testing with? Can you post a file so I can try to reproduce?
Are you sure you are on 1.42.1? This was actually a bug and pms is suppose to pick the full sub over forced. This was fixed in 1.42.2 so it should work the way you want in 1.42.1.
Oh okay you’re right, the changelog says
I must’ve forgot about it (I did the upgrade last week and only noticed yesterday). But why would I want full subs if the audio language is in my preferred language? What a terrible change.
The discussion around that was that if you are listening to your preferred language, you want to see everything. Why would you only want to see the subs for the language you know.
“full” and “forced” subtitles are different types. If your external subtitle would be of the “full” variety (like the internal one), it should be preferred.
Are both the internal and the external subtitles correctly tagged with a language?
Are the languages of the audio track and the subtitle track the same as your preferred languages in the below preference?
Did you select the same language for both Audio and Subtitles?
What is selected as “Auto-select subtitle mode”?
No I think you got that wrong. If my preferred language is German, and the audio of the movie is also German, I do not need German full subs. What I need are German forced subs for the parts that aren’t German.
I don’t wanna hijack this thread because it looks like I’m having a different issue than OP (they just said “broke” and that’s very vague) but with that I agree. The rules should be as follows
Everything is correctly tagged and set up and Auto-select subtitle mode is Always Enabled. This update basically just “broke” my whole library. The new logic simply doesn’t make any sense.
If you select that, you will always get full subtitles. Even if the movie has an audio track in your mother tongue.
So this is what you would select if you were hard of hearing.
Unfortunately, Plex doesn’t support more than one preferred language.
You will come closely to what you want to achieve, by doing this:
Set both Audio and Subtitle language to your mother tongue (or “preferred” language). It must be the same language for both, or it won’t really work.
Set “Auto-select subtitle mode” to “Shown with foreign audio”
This will cause Plex to auto-activate
Keep also in mind that the auto-selection logic on this particular item will be completely disabled, once you manually select a subtitle in any Plex client.
(This is stored for each user separately.)
I’ve always used Always Enabled more like a hack than a proper solution because Plex is notoriously bad at picking forced subtitles (and Shown with foreign audio was broken or didn’t work correctly I don’t remember). So what I did was basically create an empty forced subtitle file for ALL movies which 1) have full subs and 2) don’t have forced subs in an attempt to make it as user-friendly as possible (so you always have forced subs and never have full subs). I’ll have to go through my entire library to check if Shown with foreign audio is good enough now but I’d be nice to finally get rid of this hack.
The only thing that sucks about it is that now I have to make some phone calls with family members that for sure don’t remember their Plex password 
Web client, but others don’t work either since the issue is with the transcoder. Version is 1.43.0.10162. I run linuxserver.io docker image. Issue is only with external subs, if burned in it works as intended.
