I wont make another request and I will sit back and wait and see as PMP develops, but I have a ton of blu rays with pgs forced subtitles. LAV and xbmc/kodi/ffmpeg/pht could detect forced blu ray pgs subtitles in a stream. This is not included in PMP and thus i am out of luck with several hundred blu ray rips auto playing forced PGS subtitles when they are suppose to.
Here was the fix in kodi/xbmc 3 years prior if it helps.
Just a little more information on this request, I am basically asking for the ability like lav/mpc-hc and plex home theater/kodi/xbmc, to parse a stream and recognize forced blu ray subtitle flags (PGS) and display them.I am not asking for the ability to recognize an entire stream set to forced in mkv merge (I dont know if PMP even honors that either??? But it should…) which was present in xbmc since i began to use an htpc.
Blu rays often have a subtitle stream and with foreign parts they have a forced pgs subtitle flag to display the text for the foreign dialog, all blu ray players can recognize this. PHT could also do this since xbmc could. For example game of thrones bluray rip in makemkv, it parsed the entire subtitle stream and recognized dothraki subtitles were forced and were automatically displayed and recognized by PHT and when the dothraki scenes were over and it went back to english they were automatically turned back off. This also part of the reason i use an HTPC and loved PHT since no other clients other than an HTPC can do this…HTPC is the only device that could handle forced blu ray pgs subtitles properly. As of right now with PMP i have to turn the subtitles always on for the entire movie or tv show if their is forced subtitles for foreign dialog which is a huge step back… There is no logic in PMP to replicate what PHT could do.
In lav/mpc-hc its been around forever with this option page as well.
Just wanted to add a “me too” to this feature. I take this capability for granted in XBMC/Kodi so didn’t think to consider it in PMP. I’ve got a bunch of Blu-ray rips as well with forced subs for foreign language sections and definitely would like to see this as a priority enhancement as well!
Thats why i am worried about PMP, i will give it time and a try it again in few months and I hope its great, i wish the team the best of luck if they can pull it off it will be a great new addition, but the more i use it the more i find features and a large amount that need to be added over again that i used all the time in the old PHT.
I just witnessed this with emby/mb3 who tried to make their own desktop app, it was a constant battle adding features xbmc/kodi spent years adding and refining already.
Is the subtitle flagged as forces by the server? You can press the info button in the web interface and see if the subtitle stream in question have a forced attribute.
@tobiashieta said:
Is the subtitle flagged as forces by the server? You can press the info button in the web interface and see if the subtitle stream in question have a forced attribute.
If I am not mistaken, that is exactly not what he meant.
BluRay subtitles support a ‘dual’ personality. You have one subtitle stream, which contains all dialogue lines. Some of these lines have a ‘forced’ flag set. The BR player ‘filters’ and displays only the ‘forced’ lines if you don’t tell it to play the full subs.
This is something the Plex server doesn’t support. It can only discern normal sub streams and forced subtitle streams. But not support both attributes within one stream.
But to be fair, apart from TS streams I haven’t seen any video container which supports these ‘dual personality’ subs.
For instance, as soon as you rip a BluRay with makemkv, you can select the full and and the forced subtitle with check boxes. If you check both, you end up with 2 subtitle streams in the output file. No dual personality there anymore.
So if I understand this correctly it’s a single subtitle stream called “English” for example. Where the stream is not flagged as forced, just parts of the dialog.
I wonder how we would present this in the UI. As two different streams: “English” and “English (forced only)”. Or something else.
How is this handled in other players? mpv actually supports the feature, but there needs to be a good way to know what the user wants to do as well.
Does putting the line sub-forced-only=yes into mpv.conf and then playing a video with the normal subtitle selected help? (See https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/207338798-Advanced-Configuration on the bottom for mpv.conf.) This setting will only display the forced subtitle lines for vobsubs and PGS.
If this works, we can add better UI for this.
@tobiashieta said:
So if I understand this correctly it’s a single subtitle stream called “English” for example. Where the stream is not flagged as forced, just parts of the dialog.
I wonder how we would present this in the UI. As two different streams: “English” and “English (forced only)”. Or something else.
How is this handled in other players? mpv actually supports the feature, but there needs to be a good way to know what the user wants to do as well.
Yes, that is the idea. Most blu rays have an english stream then they have a forced flag to identify before the foreign dialog occurs to display the text on screen.
In mpc-hc it parsed the streams for forced subtitle flags then displayed the forced subs as its own forced stream (from my understanding), it also allows you to autoselect/autoload that as a preference so whenever you play a blu ray rip with pgs subtitles it parses the stream and loads the forced PGS stream as auto. Not my image but i found one on google.
PHT/XBMC/Kodi was a bit more primitive, you had to have it on the proper stream in the subtitle setting(luckily almost all my blu ray rips were defaulted to english subtitles with the forced flag). And then xbmc/pht identified the forced flag and displayed the text.
If you rip blu rays or have for years it becomes a huge issue if you did not manually extract the forced subs individually in its own subtitle set and set forced sub flag in mkvmerge . Then mpc-hc and xbmc addressed it with the above.
I will try the above vlang suggested. Really if this gets fixed i can deal with a few other nagging issues in pmp but at least use it right now, its such a big concern for me though because shows like game of thrones that were ripped years ago from blu ray, i did not have time to extract the forced subs for every single individual episode and set each to forced manually in mkvmerge. It was so much easier to rip shows with makemkv and let mpc-hc and plex home theater/xbmc handle it. And going from memory makemkv did not have a way years ago to properly deal with this.
Out of curiosity and not to get off topic, could this ever be done on the server side? Or would that be difficult impossible? If the server could do this I would not really require an HTPC whenever I watch blu rays with foreign dialog. I am guessing with transcoding and such this might be to difficult?
@vlang said:
Does putting the linesub-forced-only=yesinto mpv.conf and then playing a video with the normal subtitle selected help? (See https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/207338798-Advanced-Configuration on the bottom for mpv.conf.) This setting will only display the forced subtitle lines for vobsubs and PGS.If this works, we can add better UI for this.
I could not get this to work in a quick test. I dont know if I did something wrong with that mpv.conf either i followed those directions to add limited pc levels 16-235 based on the guide and it did not work either…(I hope to see gui options for alot of these at some times to avoid these issues). I set it to the first subtitle stream manually (did not have to do this in PHT either as discussed below) and it displayed all the subtitles… not just forced.
Another issue is no logic to load the subtitle stream that has the forced pgs subtitles. So my wife or child has no idea… In PHT I attached a picture, a subtitle in kodi/pht is always loaded whether they are “enabled” or not. Usually the first stream and in my testing of my files always has the forced subtitle flags in the stream, so i literally never had to touch it. (although i prefer mpc-hc method where it auto loads a forced stream after parsing them),
I did not touch anything in this picture, it was all just present… subtitles are not enabled but the default is set to first english stream (evident by the English 1/2 up and down section in the picture) which is set automatically in PHT/Kodi and typically the first bluray english stream contains the forced pgs subtitles anyway, then xbmc/pht plays JUST the forced subs of that stream, if you tick the enable subtitles box then it would display all subtitles… This makes things more friendly for a wife or child who would have no idea about fiddling with subs.
In PMP nothing is loaded by default so the user would still have to fiddle with loading the proper forced subtitle pgs stream themselves. Kodi/PHT has no logic for this but the way subtitles work and forced subtitle detection works as per the picture at least the first subtitle stream is loaded and then checked for forced subs, which is usually the one with the forced subtitles anyway, so i never had to touch it.
Also here is my mpv.conf file.
Make sure you select a subtitle track during testing.
Maybe I still don’t fully understand what this is about. Can someone upload an example file that demonstrates this well?
Have I understood it correctly that there are two types of forced PGS subtitles? One stream that only contains the actual subs that should be displayed, and one stream that contains everything plus tags per line that should be considered forced?
I tried looking into my library and have so far only found separate streams and none of the mixed mode you are describing. So a sample file would be lovely! 
AFAIK the ‘dual personality’ variety exists only in BR iso’s or AVCHD folders.
@vlang said:
Make sure you select a subtitle track during testing.Maybe I still don’t fully understand what this is about. Can someone upload an example file that demonstrates this well?
I did play the track, it just played all subtitles as far as i could tell… Like i said though setting display levels to limited in the conf file also did not appear to do anything so im not sure if my conf file is actually doing anything???
Hmmm most of my clips are full blu rays i am not sure how i would upload a clip. Game of thrones blu ray episodes are about 9 gigs… I really need to get this resolved before i use the new player so i would be up for any ideas.
no there is only one subtitle in the instance i am talking about. Most Blu rays have a flag in their subtitle track to display foreign dialog. So game of thrones blu ray comes with an english subtitle track, inside that their is flags for the foreign dialog. If you ever watched a blu ray you dont need to touch anything because the blu ray player recognizes those flags and displays the forced subtitles and when then foreign dialog stops it recognizes it and does not display a subtitle, if you enable subtitles though it will display the entire subtitle track (ie all subtitles for the movie not just foreign dialog).
This is why I am a bit worried about a new player now we have to try to explain something that was accomplished on the previous platform. I hope it can be added.
I dont know if that xbmc link where they added it on github helps at all in my first post… This is the guy who helped get it working with someone elses code in xbmc years ago. He was always very nice to deal with going from memory. Again though MPC-HC lav filter implementation is actually nicer, i dont know who I would ask on that end though.
http://forum.kodi.tv/member.php?action=profile&uid=144988
This was the original creator but he had not been seen since 2012. This was his original code on github.
Another example of forced blu ray pgs subtitles is avatar. The navi dialog. A forced flag tells the player when to play subtitles for navi dialog…
I will try to help in anyway possible if someone has ideas to upload a file or anything else.
Here is the make mkv description as well.
**MakeMKV FAQ
What are forced subtitles on Blu-ray disc?
Unlike DVD, on Blu-ray, each subtitle item has an attribute that specified whether particular subtitle appearance should be forced. Forced subtitles are shown regardless of current player setting, typically when movie contains a foreign language scene. The “forced” attribute is assigned per individual subtitle image, so entire subtitle track must be scanned to determine if forced subtitles are present.**
@Ghostm said:
@vlang said:
Make sure you select a subtitle track during testing.Maybe I still don’t fully understand what this is about. Can someone upload an example file that demonstrates this well?
I did play the track, it just played all subtitles as far as i could tell… Like i said though setting display levels to limited in the conf file also did not appear to do anything so im not sure if my conf file is actually doing anything???
Hmmm most of my clips are full blu rays i am not sure how i would upload a clip. Game of thrones blu ray episodes are about 9 gigs… I really need to get this resolved before i use the new player so i would be up for any ideas.
no there is only one subtitle in the instance i am talking about. Most Blu rays have a flag in their subtitle track to display foreign dialog. So game of thrones blu ray comes with an english subtitle track, inside that their is flags for the foreign dialog. If you ever watched a blu ray you dont need to touch anything because the blu ray player recognizes those flags and displays the forced subtitles and when then foreign dialog stops it recognizes it and does not display a subtitle, if you enable subtitles though it will display the entire subtitle track (ie all subtitles for the movie not just foreign dialog).
This is why I am a bit worried about a new player now we have to try to explain something that was accomplished on the previous platform. I hope it can be added.
I dont know if that xbmc link where they added it on github helps at all in my first post… This is the guy who helped get it working with someone elses code in xbmc years ago. He was always very nice to deal with going from memory. Again though MPC-HC lav filter implementation is actually nicer, i dont know who I would ask on that end though.
This was the original creator but he had not been seen since 2012. This was his original code on github.
Added support for forced subtitles in PGS streams · hakuya/xbmc@63e6c1a · GitHub
Another example of forced blu ray pgs subtitles is avatar. The navi dialog. A forced flag tells the player when to play subtitles for navi dialog…
I will try to help in anyway possible if someone has ideas to upload a file or anything else.
Here is the make mkv description as well.
**MakeMKV FAQ
What are forced subtitles on Blu-ray disc?
Unlike DVD, on Blu-ray, each subtitle item has an attribute that specified whether particular subtitle appearance should be forced. Forced subtitles are shown regardless of current player setting, typically when movie contains a foreign language scene. The “forced” attribute is assigned per individual subtitle image, so entire subtitle track must be scanned to determine if forced subtitles are present.**
As I have PGS subtitles which does not contain all the other dialogue when played back in PHT or PMP it is very clear that “yes” would have been the answer, and not “no” ( 
). There are two types of ways of marking up PGS subtitles, and you are having issues with one of them. And I assume that the devs will not blindly fix something, so a sample file is still needed. Here is how to create one: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201035968-Generating-Sample-Files-from-Media
This should work, it was 60 seconds and being blu ray I had to use dropbox it was still to large. Download the file… In plex home theater with subtitles disabled it would play the forced subtitles or foreign dialog. Currently as far as i can tell pmp can only play all the subtitles, including english speaking parts.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/t0pqdc8psy7az0k/S01E08%20(1)-032.mkv?dl=0
@Ghostm said:
This should work, it was 60 seconds and being blu ray I had to use dropbox it was still to large. Download the file… In plex home theater with subtitles disabled it would play the forced subtitles or foreign dialog. Currently as far as i can tell pmp can only play all the subtitles, including english speaking parts.
Thank you for that!
I downloaded it and added it to my setup. And it plays back the same way in PHT and PMP for me. It always shows subtitles, independent of language.
I checked the PMS XML output and noticed that that file does not have a forced flag for the subtitle:
<Stream id="507408" streamType="3" selected="1" default="1" codec="pgs" index="4" language="English" languageCode="eng" codecID="S_HDMV/PGS" format="pgs"/>
So to double check I opened it up in Media Info.app and this is the output for that file:
ID : 5
Format : PGS
Muxing mode : zlib
Codec ID : S_HDMV/PGS
Codec ID/Info : Picture based subtitle format used on BDs/HD-DVDs
Language : English
Default : Yes
Forced : No```
So that file has no forced subtitle according to any software I use. Less of all PMS. So I am starting to get confused on how you are getting it to work in PHT? Because my PHT is not showing it. Which PHT version are you using?So I downloaded this sample. If I play it with sub-forced-only=yes, I see subtitles, except when they speak English I don’t see any. Isn’t this what is expected?
