Since the latest Plex update on Apple TV, external SRT subtitles have become almost unusable.
The subtitles only appear intermittently — sometimes one line shows up, then several lines of dialogue are completely skipped, and subtitles may not appear again for another 15–20 seconds.
I’ve done quite a bit of testing:
With Burn Subtitles set to Automatic or Never, everything plays via Direct Play, but the external SRT subtitles are only displayed occasionally and a lot of dialogue is missing.
With Burn Subtitles set to Always, Plex transcodes the video and burns in the SRT subtitles, and then every subtitle line displays correctly.
The exact same media files and external SRT subtitles work correctly on the Plex app on my TCL Smart TV.
These same files also worked correctly on Apple TV before the recent Plex app update.
Unfortunately, the new Apple TV app has turned something that worked perfectly for years into something I currently can’t use for subtitled content.
Please investigate this. External SRT subtitles with Direct Play are a pretty basic and important feature, and forcing video transcoding just to display an SRT correctly should not be necessary.
Hopefully this can be fixed soon.
