I'm losing my mind! Subtitles, the magic of Plex

General Discussions
1

Hello

So I have been using Plex for some time now, and always run my subtitles as separate file - e.g. srt. Normally it has worked but for the last 6 months its become pure magic and I can’t figure out why.

All the subtitles are Language Coded, e.g. en, fi etc.
The working file are are in UTF-8, some UTF-8-BOM and others ANSI - same as the none working files.
I have tried renaming one of the working file to one of the none working file and it still doesn’t show up in Plex.
What am I doing wrong?

Its driving me nuts and really infuriating when I know the file is there, and any other video software can use it - but Plex for some reason doesn’t.

Hope a kind soul can give me a hint, thanks in advance

2

All subtitles in Plex must be encoded in UTF-8. All other encodings may work in one client type but not in an other type.

If your server runs not on Windows, you might wanna check ‘read’ privileges. On Linux (and some NAS platforms) PMS runs under a separate user account plex. If you download subtitles with some 3rd party tool, it must set the ‘read’ privileges on these downloaded subtitle files, so plex is actually able to read them.

Subtitles downloaded from e.g. opensubtitles are sometimes invalid/malformed. often this has to do with the advertising blurb opensubtitles.org inserts into these.
While the Plex transcoder is a bit more robust, the various clients are sometimes very picky when it comes to SRT subtitles. This may be one of the thing whioch have changed recently as some clients only recently learned to display subtitles without the transcoder’s help (i.e. with out them getting “burned in” by the transcoder).
It happens very often when looking at some subtitles submitted here with a bugreport that these are malformed. So if you have somewhere a Windows computer, get the excellent Subtitle Edit which can repair almost any defective SRT file. (it can change the text encoding to UTF-8 too - on whole folders)

3

Thanks, really informative… I have taken a look at Subtile Edit, seems really nice and ran a fix common errors - still no dice.

I can try and explain it differently, because its driving me mad:

  • So I have “A”, it has a subtitle called A.en.srt - it’s in UTF-8. From Opensubtitles.org and works perfectly.
  • Then we have movie “B”, it has a subtitle called B.en.srt - also in UTF-8. Doesn’t work at all in Plex Web or Rasplex.
  • I then try to rename A.en.srt to B.en.srt - because it should work right? No, still nothing. I have even tried to refresh the library and just the movie, still nothing.
  • But renaming B.en.srt to A.en.srt - works just fine? No need to do anything, works instantly. I’m so damn lost

I’m running Plex and my files from a AsusTor but as some subtitles works for some movies, I find it hard to believe privileges should be the issue.

If you or anybody can help me more - I would be so grateful. Thanks in advance.

4

Check your folder and file names for non-ascii special characters.
Does the movie which works have no such chars,
but the movie which doesn’t work has some ä è Â ° etc ?

Zip it up and attach one of the non-working subtitles.

5

Do you have all of your movies all lumped together in a single directory? Or do you have a separate folder for each movie and the associated subs for that movie in the folder? (/movies or /movies/Avengers - Age of Ultron (2015)?)

Do you run some sort of renamer against your media to get consistent names for everything, including subtitles? Are all of your subs named with the language code?

I ask these questions, because I run on Asustor hardware too. I have a separate folder for each movie title, renamed with FileBot for consistency. All of the subs or posters, or artwork, etc. for a given movie go into the folder for that movie and that movie alone. then, if you look at my library at the edit level, you would see it’s looking at a folder named “movies” and then each movie is it’s own folder under that. And all the pertinent files for a given movie are contained in the folder for that movie.

And that folder is named according to the name of the movie after FileBot has renamed it with Title (year)[resolution].ext so an English sub for that movie is going to be Title (year) [resolution].eng.srt. (So the folder’s name is Title (year) but no resolution, since I may have 2 or 3 versions of a movie in the folder to chose from.)

This works for every movie I have in my library that I have subs for. (Which is quite a lot, and I also have Spanish subs for most.) If I need to move a movie, I do it at a folder level and not a file level. Everything for that given movie is moved at one shot, including posters, artwork, subs, different resolutions, etc.

I actually go a step further with my folders, breaking movies into alpha based on first whole word of the title. So for the above example of Avengers - Age of Ultron, my structure is like this:

/movies <---- Library share point
…/A
…/Avengers - Age of Ultron (2015)
…Avengers - Age of Ultron (2015) [720].mp4
…Avengers - Age of Ultron (2015) [SD].mp4
…Avengers - Age of Ultron (2015).eng.srt
…Avengers - Age of Ultron (2015). spa.srt

This naming works for every movie in my library, with no problems what so ever. Subs are there and play perfectly every time on any movie in the library that has them.

I’m going to suggest that you give this a try for the movie “B” you are having issues with, first renaming it to what I outlined above, then create a folder matching the movie name, and putting it into the folder, keeping the name for the subs, as well. (Some downloads will have subs tied to that rip, and you can also include the resolution in the Sub name, if you need to. I find that this works just as well.)

6

OttoKerner: In this case, the Movie that works is “Die Hard (1988)” and the one that gives issues “Deadpool (2016)”. So no special characters. Also the Deadpool subtitle work as soon as I name it to Die Hard, but neither the Die Hard or Deadpool works with the Deadpool movie.
This is was puzzles me the most, the inconsistency.

MikeG6.5:

  • I have all movies in a single folder, don’t know why but I always done it this way when it comes to movies and never had any issues.
  • Yes, I have a script running - so movies is name “Movie Title (Release Year).Filetype” and subtitles “Movie Title (Release Year).Language.Filetype”
    But damn you have some control over your folder structure. Color me impressed and multiple resolutions of movies - the amount of disk space you must have. I’m a little jealous :slight_smile:

I just tried to move the Deadpool movie to it’s own folder and update the library… and it works.
What in the…??? Is this actually a thing, that Plex now needs movies to be in separate folders?
Well I know what I will be doing for the next couple of days and a plus I will have a neat folder structure like MikeG6.5 :wink:

I thank you two so much, you made my day. I hope this will fix the issue in the future.

Have an amazing day