Server Version#: 1.23.1.4571
Player Version#: 4.57.4
I’m not entirely sure if this is an issue with plex media server, but it started occurring on every platform I watch media from after a server update, so I thought I’d post it here.
After updating to the latest plex media server, I started having issues where subtitle preferences were just being ignored. I’ve previously had trouble with plex auto-selecting the correct subtitles, so I went through and marked my preferred subtitles as “forced”. This worked before this update with no issues at all, but after this update it doesn’t auto-select the correct subtitles at all.
There is not setting to auto select the forced subtitle. There is a setting for that related to searching for subtitles when using the “search” option for subtitles.
I’m sorry, but I don’t quite understand what you are saying. Is it not default behavior that plex should automatically select forced subtitles? I have tried with different subtitle settings under account settings, such as telling it to only used forced subtitles and telling it to always show subtitles, but the behavior with subtitles doesn’t change.
Under your account settings, there is an option for auto-selecting subtitles. Here you can set your preferred audio and subtitle languages and the auto-select mode. The last 2 options are for the subtitle search on demand feature and not related to the auto-select mode.
Here’s what the auto-select mode does.
manually selected - no auto selection occurs and you must choose your subtitle every time
always enabled - if a subtitle track exists with your preferred subtitle language, it will choose that track. If you have multiple track in that language, it will pick the first one.
shown with foreign audio - if you choose the audio track that matches your preferred audio language, PMS will pick a “forced” subtitle track matching your preferred subtitle language if it exists. If you choose an audio language that is not your preferred audio language, PMS will pick the fist subtitle track that matches your preferred subtitle track.
So in your case if you want the forced track all the time, set both audio and subtitle language to the same, then set the auto mode to “with foreign audio”. Now, as long as your files are tagged with the same language you picked, you should get the forced subtitle by default.
Ah, okay. In that case I guess the previous behavior that I liked was not standard. Is this possible to do for different languages though?
The behavior I want is to select forced english subtitles regardless of audio language, and to select other english subtitles if there is no forced version available. I have foreign language content and I do not want it auto-selecting english tracks.
No. There are requests to have these preferences be based per library and other similar requests. Search and then add you vote to whatever sounds most related to what you want.
After the last server update, for me it has also broken the subtitle preferences.
Before I always used my native language “Dutch” als preferred audio language and set the subtitle option to “only when using foreign” because of this I had automatically English subtitles for English movies and by default no subtitles selected for my dutch movies.
After the update, when using these exact options. It put my subtitles on off for every movie.
Yes, I have this as well with German subtitles, so it seems language doesn’t matter.
Since 1.23.1 when I select “German” as preferred audio language for my account and “show subtitles with foreign language only” it actually does the exact opposite.
For all “German” language audio tracks, it will automatically enable subtitles, and for all foreign tracks it will disable subtitles, which is exactly the wrong way around.
It worked fine until 1.23.1, so something must have changed. I verified that audio languages are being detected for the video files correctly, that looks all good. Even with files where it worked perfectly fine before 1.23.1 it now always enables subtitles when the show is in my preferred language and disables them when the audio is foreign.
Here’s part of a verbose log excerpt when playing a German audio TV episode. It somehow seems to think the audio is foreign (a “de” / “ger” mismatch maybe?) and then selects and displays an English subtitle for it.
Nevertheless it seems the foreign/not foreign language detection for automatic subtitle selection is currently not working correctly.
May 30, 2021 14:03:43.926 [0x7f50bcea5b38] DEBUG - [Transcode] We’re going to try to auto-select an audio stream for account 1.
May 30, 2021 14:03:43.926 [0x7f50bcea5b38] DEBUG - [Transcode] Selecting best audio stream for part ID 28533 (autoselect: 1 language: de)
May 30, 2021 14:03:43.926 [0x7f50bcea5b38] DEBUG - [Transcode] We’re going to try to auto-select a subtitle.
May 30, 2021 14:03:43.926 [0x7f50bcea5b38] DEBUG - [Transcode] Selected a foreign audio track: ger
May 30, 2021 14:03:43.926 [0x7f50bcea5b38] DEBUG - [Transcode] Subtitles: Found a candidate subtitle language [eng] for a foreign film
By the way, we had the exactly same issue/regression a while ago already, see here:
So it does seem to select the “correct” English subtitle, but it shows it on the wrong occasion. Like it somehow thinks English is my native language and German is foreign, which however is not what I’ve set in my settings.
Not sure it it has any influence on this, but my German media is stored in a library which has its library language set to German, my English media is in a library that has its language set to English.
It all worked fine until 1.23, so I can safely say, nothing has changed in my settings since then that would affect this.
@Phiolin Thanks for linking my thread. Because of that I got a notification about this thread and now know that I have to wait before updating to 1.23.
It’s really annoying that Plex breaks automatic subtitle selection again.
This broke for me too, Seems they’re breaking something different after fixing something quite a lot lately. Forced is completely ignored now no matter what preference is set in account.
This is broken since update. Didn’t touch it and now forced subtitles in account are completely ignored. (tried changing the settings and analysing multiple times it’s broke.)
I had to reset the subtitle settings.
First, I’ve set the subtitle to “always enabled”, then I disabled and reenabled “Automatically select audio and subtitle tracks” and set it again to “shown with foreign audio”.
