Forced subtitles work great - except for one movie. Hmmm...

General Discussions
1

Hey all -

Something strange has come up.
To start, I have everything setup correctly for Plex to use forced subtitles properly. However, something odd is happening with only this one specific movie. Basically, I have the subtitles in the mkv file flagged properly as Forced. Subtitles display just fine when I use VLC outside of Plex AND works fine with the Mac Plex desktop app. But iOS, apple tv, and Web doesn’t display any subtitles!

I haven’t seen this inconsistency before.
Any thoughts?
Thanks!

2

  1. please post the mediainfo XML of the affected movie

  2. which settings did you made under Settings - Server - Languages ?

  3. Plex Dance the movie. The automatic selection only works if the subtitle selector wasn’t touched once manually before. Once you make a manual selection, it ‘sticks’.

3

Thanks for the quick reply! See XML attached.
Settings are set to English / Shown with foreign audio / English.
I’ll take a look at #3 as well.

4

The xml shows that the forced subtitle stream has already been selected for display.

Are you saying even though it is selected, the subtitles don’t show up?
If so, what type of device is running your plex server?
The subtitles are in a bitmap format, so display on the 3 types of clients where they’re failing requires the server being able to transcode.

5

Correct, I’m saying that even though it is selected, they don’t display.
Specifically though, they DO display when I run Plex Media Player on the Mac. But they don’t on any iOS device or Apple TV.

I’m running the android server off my shield tv.

6

@OnDemand2.0 said:
I’m running the android server off my shield tv.

Oh, that type of device I don’t know well. It might be, that the bitrate of the movie is just a tiny bit too much for it. Do you really need all 5 audio streams?
Just for the sake of experimentation, can you remux the file and leave out 3 or 4 of the audio tracks?
Does this file then behave differently?

I do see there is at least one other report about the Shield where there are PGS subtitles not appearing.
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/232016/still-problems-with-anamorphic-dvd-material-and-vobsub-and-blu-ray-pgs-subtitels#latest

7

I think we’ll need log files to diagnose further.

  1. activate debug logging (not ‘verbose’!)
  2. quit Plex Server
  3. wait 1 minute
  4. start Plex Server
  5. wait 2 minutes
  6. play one affected movie on a device where the subtitles fail to show up. Make a note of the local time when you press Play. After a minute Stop the playback
  7. wait 3 minutes
  8. shut down Plex server
  9. wait 1 minute
  10. zip up the whole log folder and attach it here

Here is how to get log files from the Shield:
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/220347688-Accessing-Internal-Storage

8

Sorry for the delay on this response. Really appreciate the help. In the near-term, I just burned in the subtitles until future versions resolve the issue. It was just faster that was since this is the first time I’ve come across this. Thanks again!

9

Keep in mind that ‘burning in’ subtitles is a lossy operation, as every transcoding operation is. I hope you saved the untampered, original file.

10

Yup. I did.