Since upgrading to 1.16.4.1469 from 1.16.3 Plex has been automatically selecting English subtitles for English movies where earlier it wouldn’t. Even when there are forced subtitles available, it’s selecting the non-forced variety, where previously it would have selected the forced subtitles. This even appears to occur when no subtitle stream is explicitly set to “default”.
Below are my PMS language settings, which haven’t changed since 1.16.3:
I imagine this has something to do with this change from the latest update:
(Subtitles) Issues with automatic selection when default subtitle and audio languages differ (#10241)
These settings are not relevant for you because
They are only effective if the server is not signed into a Plex account.
(And the check box on top is not ticked, anyway)
The relevant settings are in your Plex account.
Each user can define these individually for him-/herself.
In the web app, click on your user avatar in the top-right corner.
‘Account’ - ‘Language settings’
Make sure the checkbox at the top is ticked.
And select an audio language too. Otherwise Plex won’t know what is “foreign” to you.
I see, thanks for the clarification. So these are my account settings:
As you can see, I haven’t specified any kind of automatic selection, yet the behaviour has changed. And even when I do select automatic subtitle selection and specify English as my preferred language and “shown with foreign audio”, it still automatically selects non-forced English subtitles for English-marked media.
No, but I am experiencing this issue on all the platforms I use, none of whose settings have changed since upgrading: Web, PMP, and Android. Thanks for trying to help, by the way.
Are you sure that the subtitle selector on those videos was never touched/changed manually by you?
Because as soon as you change it manually, this will override the automatic selection. And it will be stored in your user account.
Thanks for the logs. I can see where it is auto-selecting the subtitle track.
Can you make the opposite test and enable the ‘Automatic track selection’ checkbox?
Make the rest of the selections like in your first screenshot above.
But do it in your plex account and not in the server settings.
Then restart the client and enter the same video’s preplay page and look what happened to the subtitle selector.
So I enabled auto selection under account settings, and chose no preferred audio language, English as the preferred subtitle language, and to auto select “with foreign audio”. With these settings the same subtitle stream is selected as when auto selection is disabled.
I have filed ‘ignoring the track auto-selection checkbox’ as a bug.
That being said, I think that the combination of
Audio=no preference
Subtitle=preferred language
Subtitle mode= foreign audio
is not well-specified in Plex
I will suggest a change here, to cover the special case of preferred audio language=none.
Thanks. Not specifying a preferred audio language is important when wanting to watch foreign-language films in their native language and the media also contains dubbed audio streams.
And I should stress that before this latest version, even without auto-selection enabled (and so no preferred audio set), Plex would still auto-select forced subtitles in my (or the servers, or the default) preferred subtitle language when they were available, which I think is the ideal behaviour.
Yes, sorry, those two sentences weren’t meant to be directly related: in the use-case of foreign language films, Plex generally used to automatically enable subtitles as well, without that option being explicitly enabled, and from what I can remember, they were usually English — though that may just be because they were often the first or only available subtitle stream… or perhaps Plex was taking a cue from my interface language in the absence of any explicit settings.
In the case of forced subtitles, I was just talking about how it used to only auto-select forced English subtitles for English media, and never other types of English subtitles, and how I think that is a good default behaviour in the absence of explicit settings.
