So my movies are stored in MKV’s with PGS subtitles marked as forced when necessary for foreign language segments. On my account (the server administrator) Plex seems to pick this up by default. See the picture below. However, for my shared users, the forced subtitles are not enabled by default and are instead switched off. I have tried changing to language settings for a test user to match mine, but still no dice. What am I doing wrong?
Or maybe the issue is that language settings are not updating for the shared users? Is it supposed to be instant? Do I need to refresh the library somehow?
I’m not 100% certain on this, but I have a feeling that updating the language settings are not retroactive to any media you have prior to changing the setting. I think the setting will be applied going forward.
However, you could try refreshing metadata and/or analyzing the media and see if that makes a change.
I think what will need to be done is that the forced subs for anything you added prior to the language settings being updated for your shared users will need to be manually selected but going forward it would auto select per the settings.
-Shark2k
Thanks shark2k. I think it is working now. If seemed to have taken a few minutes to take effect. From what I can tell, for shared users there is no way to force refresh the libraries.
It seems to have applied to all existing titles unless the subtitles had been manually changed previously.
I feel like the default behavior should be changed, meaning Plex should respect forced flags by default. This created a lot of frustrating amongst my shared users.
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Plex does respect forced sub flag, but only if there is not another language subtitle rule in between. For example, if you have a regular non-forced track, it will not pick an english “forced” track if you have a non-english audio track in the file.
As for refreshing the library, that is done server-side. All people that use your library files will retreive the data from your database, and refreshing the library is simply a database update on all your files.
If I’m understanding what you are referring to correctly, then Plex is acting correctly in the example you gave. Forced subs are only required when the audio and forced subtitle language are the same because within the audio track there are times where the spoken language is not the same, so what is being said needs to be translated to the overall audio track language.
If you are picking an audio track that is different then you preferred audio language, then you would want the full subtitle track in your preferred language and not the forced track.
To make it more clear hopefully I’ll give some examples.
For all examples we’ll use these preferences (same as OP and myself):
Preferred language: English
Track selection: English audio, English subtitles shown with foreign audio
Example 1.
Movie 1
- 2 subtitle tracks, English and English Forced
- Audio track is English
Behavior from Plex based on above preferences:
- Audio set to English (only track)
- Subtitle track set to English Forced
Example 2:
Movie 2
- Multiple subs with one being English Forced
- Multiple audio tracks (English, Spanish, German) (original language is English)
Behavior from Plex based on above preferences:
- Audio set to English
- English Forced track selected
Behavior if different audio selected from above preferences:
- Audio manually changed to German
- Subtitle automatically changed to English non-forced
Again, the reason being that the forced tracks only contain generally a fraction of the lines that a full subtitle track contains.
Basically, with the settings the OP has, the forced track will be picked anytime the language of the audio track and forced subtitle track are the same, as expected. Once the selected audio track is different from the preferred language, a non-forced tracked in the preferred language will be selected, if available.
-Shark2k
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