I have a lot of videos where the English subtitles are automatically set to load, but all I want is for forced foreign language subtitles to load. This happens with both embedded subtitles and external SRT subtitles. They all have their language metadata set correctly, or have the right file names (e.g. The Americans S01E01.eng.srt). The worst part is that this seems to be a bit random. Some files (usually whole seasons) won’t have them loaded already, but some do. It really makes no sense. Like I said, the languages aren’t “unknown”.
Does anyone know what’s going on here? Perhaps someone has already solved this before. I’ve searched around the forum and haven’t found anything about this. Any help would be very much appreciated. It’s really annoying having to turn them off all the time and I don’t want my family having to deal with that all the time just for forced subtitles to work.
These are my settings in Settings > Server > Languages:
The above settings are only valid for the server owner plex account.
Shared users must make their own language preferences for their own accounts here https://plex.tv/users/profile
There is currently no way to set any language prefs for managed users, (except with MovieFans’s Database Tool [which only works on Windows])
Make sure that:
- if they are internal subtitles, that the ‘forced’ tag is only set on subtitle tracks, not also on video or audio tracks (this is currently a bug in Plex - it has already been reported)
- if these are external subtitles, they must be marked as ‘forced’ by modifying their file name like so:
The Americans S01E01.eng.forced.srt
- the subtitle files you have must actually be forced subtitles. There is no way for Plex to extract the right ‘forced’ lines from ‘full’ subtitles.
Thank you for that but of info, but it unfortunately doesn’t help. I’m just talking about my account right now, which is the server owner account. Forced subtitles work correctly and only the subtitles are marked as forced, not video or audio. The problem is that since I set those settings shown in the OP, other “normal” English subtitles are chosen automatically too, when it should just be forced subtitles. This forces me to either turn off normal subtitles for a lot of videos, or just deal with not having forced subtitles chosen automatically for me. I’m not sure why this is happening. All settings seem to be right and the subtitles are named correctly or have correct metadata.
please check #1,
whether your mkv files have the ‘forced’ flag set on other track types, like audio or video
You need to use https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo to verify this, Plex’s internal mediainfo only shows you the forced flag on audio and subtitle streams.
I just checked and no tracks are set as forced. There are audio tracks (and embedded subtitles) set to default, but not forced.
Does this happen the same in all types of Plex clients ? Or are there only certain clients affected?
I’ve checked Plex Web and the Roku client and it’s the same on both. For now I just turned off “Automatically select audio and subtitle tracks” because it’s just too much work turning subtitles off frequently and most content doesn’t have forced subtitles.
Are you using Safari as web browser?
I use Google Chrome on Windows. Either the Plex Chrome app, or the normal Web page.
Sorry for bringing this up again, but did you check the settings in https://plex.tv/users/profile for your own account? It might be out of sync with the settings in the server manager.
Sorry, I didn’t check that before, but it’s the same. I think I figured out the problem. It seems to happen when the audio tracks’ languages are unknown. So I used MKVToolNix to change the audio/video language of a test video to English and it seemed to fix the issue. The English subtitle no longer shows. I wish I didn’t have to do this for every video with unknown language, but at least I think I know the problem. I also experimented with the Prefer audio tracks in setting, but that didn’t change anything.
Yeah, you have to decide which you prefer.
Either you
- don’t tag your video files with language tags at all. In this case you select ‘Unknown’ as ‘preferred audio language’.
- tag all audio tracks with the proper language tag
Yeah. I just don’t see what the audio language has to do with the subtitle chosen. At least I was able to fix them all using Cygwin/zsh to iterate through a season at a time using FFmpeg to copy the tracks and set language metadata for the audio. That made it quite a fast process to fix my TV show library. Everything is working as expected now. 
Thanks for trying to help me @OttoKerner.
Well… I know what I’m going to be doing this weekend…
@DaveBinM For .mkv files, you should use mkvpropedit for changing the language of audio tracks. I posted this in another thread, but here is the command I use to change the language of the 1st audio track of every .mkv file in a directory (and sub-directories) to English:
for i in **/*.mkv ; do
mkvpropedit "$i" --edit track:s1 --set language=eng
done;
I think something similar is possible with mp4box, but I haven’t learned it yet. mkvpropedit can be used for all kinds of things. I also use it for adding chapters from chapterdb, setting track names, etc. It does it without remuxing, which is awesome and really fast.
@JordanHarris thanks for the additional information. All of mine are .mkv files (blu-ray rips, mostly), with embedded subtitles. On the movies that have forced subtitles, I’ve already set the forced flag using MKVToolNix, so I’d expect it to be picked up automatically,
Mmm. I’m trying to work out how this should look in the UI on Plex/Web. Should it show the forced subtitle selected before you hit play?
@DaveBinM said:
@JordanHarris thanks for the additional information. All of mine are .mkv files (blu-ray rips, mostly), with embedded subtitles. On the movies that have forced subtitles, I’ve already set the forced flag using MKVToolNix, so I’d expect it to be picked up automatically,
If it doesn’t let it Analyze the library. (Normally, the butler should take care of this automatically)
Mmm. I’m trying to work out how this should look in the UI on Plex/Web. Should it show the forced subtitle selected before you hit play?
It should show in the Plex Web interface.
But:
the automatic track selection works only for movies where you haven’t touched the track selectors already ‘by hand’. This is so the automatic doesn’t revert your intentional track selections.
If you want to be sure that the automatic works, let it loose on a new movie (or Plex Dance an old one).
@OttoKerner Ah… therein lies my problem. All of my films/shows with forced subtitles are ones I’ve touched before (I previously had “prefer subtitles” set to manual). I’ll have to just check this next time I add something which has forced subtitles.
