I am having trouble displaying subtitles on my Plex Os X server. My media is ripped in MakeMKV w/ subtitles and the subtitles show up and are toggleable in VLC. They’re there and useable.
I have googled it and adjusted my server settings, which all seemed and still seem fine. I have turned on subtitles in the player as the media is playing. Based on everything I know, I should be seeing subtitles.
What’s the secret or what’s the hidden problem? This seems like a darned simple thing. What am I doing wrong?
You’re not very specific as to what exact issue you have.
Are the subtitles simply not showing or do you get buffering issues?
It’ll come down to the question which types of subtitles your Plex Client supports. Your Blu-Ray/DVD rips use image based subtitles… many clients cannot display those and depend on the Plex Server tu „burn“ them into the video (similar to transcoding the video).
Sorry. Because they are ripped into MKV format, my expectation is that they are data rather than image-based. By data-based, I mean as they are on the disk itself and as they function in VLC. I expect to be able to toggle them on and off. But they do not appear, regardless of my settings in the built-in Plex player.
Oh, this is interesting! Subtitles do work as expected in the player on my Mac that hosts the server. Where the subtitles do not appear are on my Apple TV Plex client.
MakeMKV will add subtitles in a PGS format (image-based as @tom80H mentioned). They play fine on my Nvidia Shield, but I don’t think AppleTV supports them.
If you know how to use MKVToolNix you can remux the movie and add SRT (text-based ) versions of the subtitles. Opensubtitles.org is a great place to download SRT subtitles. You’ll need a tolerance for “less-than-quality” subtitles though, since my experience has been they tend to be full of spelling errors, and the subtitle timing is often off for my version of a movie. There are subtitle editing programs out there to deal with these issues.
Another option would be to pull the PGS subtitles out (can be done with MKVToolNix), and use a subtitle editor (I’m not familiar with one for a MAC OS) to create an SRT version. Be aware that process is a bit of a hassle as well, but will get you usable subtitles.
for macOS there’s an app called Subler – open the mkv file with it, pick the subtitle stream, save and it’ll convert the PGS subtitle to SRT; the underlying text recognition is pretty good (while not perfect).
Hi all! Thank you for helping me debug this. It turns out I had a bad setting in my Apple TV settings. Subtitles were set to “unknown language” for whatever historical glitch reason. I fixed that and now I am good to go!
