Hey folks,
I’ve been doing some searches but haven’t quite found anything definitive for my needs. I noticed when playing movies like Star Wars 4k or Game of Thrones 4k MKV files, that quite often the subtitles for alien languages, dothraki/valerian, etc. are missing by default. For Game of Thrones, if I go into the subtitle options, there are 2 english subtitles - one is full-english subtitles for everything, the other are the “forced” subtitles only to just see the dothraki languages. However, this is inconvenient, as I have to turn the subtitles on for every episode that happens to have that in it.
In the Plex account > Audio & Subtitle settings, I have it set to:
Unchecked - automatically select audio and subtitle tracks
SUBTITLES FOR THE DEAF OR HARD-OF-HEARING (SDH) SEARCHES - prefer non SDH subtitles
FORCED SUBTITLE SEARCHES - Prefer forced subtitles
Under Plex Account > Settings > Languages I have it set to:
unchecked - automatically select audio and subtitle tracks
Prefer audio tracks in - English
Subtitle mode - show with foreign audio
Prefer subtitles in - English
So, I think there are 3 main questions:
How can I see when using MakeMKV if there is a forced subtitle track, to ensure it’s available
If there are “forced” subtitles but they aren’t labeled as such on the disk, how can I use a tool to set the “forced” flag and resave the mkv files?
For instances like Game of Thrones where the forced track clearly exists on applicable episodes, how do I get that to play by default (as it does on the physical disk) when watching in Plex?
Recognizing forced subtitles can be tricky with MakeMKV. Theoretically it should show the subtitles and their forced counterparts in its tree organization – however they’re not always properly organized or even contain empty streams.
You can use MKVToolNix to edit the stream headers, therefore specifying which of the subtitle streams are considered forced and which aren’t. This works also if a track has no proper language tagging.
For Plex to automatically pick up the forced subtitles, you need to go back to your account’s audio & subtitle preferences (as pointed out in your own post).
check Automatically select audio and subtitle tracks
Thanks to both of you who have replied so far. I just activated “automatically select audio and subtitle tracks” so hopefully that will help. I did download MKVtoolNix and I see that shows such as Game of Thrones or movies like Star Wars don’t seem to have a forced subtitle set for any of them, nor does that field exist.
I’m guessing I need to check the box to add that field, then set it on the appropriate subtitle field. It looks like there might be some “guessing and checking” here as shows like Game of Thrones list 2 english subtitle tracks – likely one for full english subtitles for the whole episode, and one for the forced subtitles, and unless you can teach me otherwise, I don’t think MKVtoolNix will show me which is which (via file size or anything else). If it can, I’d love to know how.
Once I make these flag changes and re-save the file, do I need to run a library scan And/Or a metadata refresh, or will it detect this at run-time when I try to play the file?
select the subtitle track you want to edit and expand that node (#1 in my screenshot above)
select the property 'Forced display' flag(#2 in my screenshot above)
set the property value
if the property doesn’t exist, there’s a checkbox Add element, that’ll enable the field New value and lets you set it to Yes
if the property exists, set Current value to Yes(#3 in my screenshot)
Save the file
MKVToolNix will not show you which is which.
There’s a number of ways to get to that… you can play the movie in VLC and switch between subtitle tracks to identify this yourself – this can be quite time consuming as you need to “know” where to look for forced subtitles.
I’m on a Mac and like to use an app called Subler. When opening an MKV file in Subler, the app will attempt to create a mp4 file and offers you an option to select all tracks you want to import. In the process of “importing” the subtitle tracks, it’ll apply an OCR to convert the image based subtitles of DVDs and Blu-Rays into SRTs (text-based subtitles). You can export those from the newly created mp4 file. Even if the OCR might be super bad, you’ll easily recognize which is which.
Plex might not automatically pick up the changes. You can wait for some scheduled deep analysis – otherwise you can Analyze the file inside Plex. This will bring the changes to its awareness.
Important note:
The audio/subtitle selection will be overruled if you manually select a track. The next time you open Plex, it won’t show the “automatic selection” but stick with your previous selection. This might cause some hiccups if you already watched a lot of the episodes you’re not planning to fix.
Another question about your important note. Is there a way to make plex “forget” and reset what it knew about your playback preferences? that seems like the best way for me to test if editing the files and/or updating plex settings fixed this and made a difference.
I’m not aware of any way to trigger this from within Plex.
Your best shot might be to perform a so called Plex Dance. This will make Plex forget the episode/movie entirely and add it fresh to your library. Downside: Plex will also forget your individual changes, ratings or watch history for this item.
Thanks so much for the help today. I can report back that after setting the subtitle tracks I needed to both “default” and “forced”, then in plex selecting “Analyze”, that seemed to pick them up just fine.
One last curve ball to throw at you. For the UHD release of Game of Thrones (complete series), every episode defaults to Dolby 5.1 audio instead of defaulting to (my preferred) Dolby Atmos track. In MKVToolNix, I switched from the 5.1 track as “default” to the Atmos mix as “default”, but plex still pre-selects the 5.1 mix when I go to play an episode. The same trick (Analyzing the file) doesn’t seem to matter here. Any thoughts on how to override the default in plex, as it seems to be ignoring the edit to defaults I made previously?
Unfortunately there’s no good reason. It’s an Nvidia shield pro set to bitstream out into my 11.1.4 channel receiver. Literally every other movie I watch with the option of an Atmos or DTS:X track defaults to that, but Game of Thrones always defaults to 5.1. Strangely, they made the decision even on the disks that the default should be 5.1 instead of 7.1/Atmos, but I had thought using MKVToolNix to change the default would make a difference. It didn’t change anything (though the forced subtitles did the trick there), so now I’m using MKVToolNix to strip out the 5.1 track so the Atmos will remain and (therefore) be the default track. I tried it on one episode so far, and after hitting “Analyze” on plex, it worked like a charm, so now I Just have to do the other 70+ episodes of game of thrones and I’ll be set (big sigh)
