I use Plex for a couple of months, already bought the Plex Pass because it’s an amazing piece of software.
Now to my issue. I mostly watch my movies and series with English audio and Czech subtitles. Everything was working alright until few days ago. Now when I click on any episode of a series or any movie, there is just set the English as an audio, but there are no subtitles selected even when they are available. I didn’t have any problem like that before.
I tried this on the web player, Plex Media Player and on Android Plex app. It doesn’t work anywhere.
I checked if everything is set well. And it is. It’s set the same way it was before, when everything was working correctly.
I tried it in the TV series where I never fiddled with audio/subtitle language and it still doesn’t automatically choose the Czech subtitles.
Is there anything I can do to fix this? Or did the last update broke this?
Where did you check? There are 2 places and the one under ‘Server’ settings is only used if the server is not signed onto a plex account.
Go into your account https://app.plex.tv/desktop#!/settings/account
and open the the ‘Audio & Subtitle Settings’
Make sure the checkbox at the top is activated
and that the selections underneath do mirror your preferences.
Yes, that is the same case as the one in my last link above.
Set your audio language to Czech (or, if you want to avoid Czech audio, select a language you definitely don’t have in your files).
If I change the audio language to some that isn’t anywhere in the files, it uses the default audio language that is set in the mkv file, and it properly selects the Czech subtitles. But when I set it back to English audio, it doesn’t select the Czech subtitles automatically anymore.
(I could change the interface to english so you would understand it better, but then it would mess with the “use with foreign language audio” settings in the subtitle language settings, no?)
That’s because the “Show with foreign audio” reads from the “Audio Language to Use” section instead of the System Language setting. So if you choose “English” and it finds an English Audio track, it won’t load subtitles, in czech or otherwise
Even when I have preferred subtitle language set to Czech? That doesn’t make any sense. What should I have set in that language settings then, if I want to have English (or original language of the movie), and use Czech subtitles, but when there is only Czech audio, I don’t want Czech subtitles active? Because this settings I have set right now was working like that, until this week.
I dunno, I have this same problem with Anime. Choose Czech Audio as preferred Audio. Then it will play movies with Czech Audio that have it. But for anything without a Czech audio track it will play the first language file (probably English) and it will play subtitles.
In the animated gif/movie you played above, you chose English as your preferred Audio Language, and you should have chosen Czech I think.
Also, according to Otto, there is a difference between “Cesky” and “Cestina”… So that could be the root of the issue under normal circumstances
But I don’t want to have the audio set to Czech. I want to have original (most of the time English) audio and Czech subtitles.
That’s Czech declension it means the same thing, maybe that’s why it doesn’t work now, yeah… but that’s probably because of the Plex update, nothing to do with my side I think…
I should have the 1st step available and working, because I have the subtitle that matches my preferred subtitle language … maybe it’s the “Čeština” vs “Česky” problem… why does it work when I don’t have set Audio language to English though…
1. only applies if your preferred audio language is not found. But your video file does have your preferred audio language. Therefore no subtitle gets activated, because the audio track is not ‘foreign’.
Preferred Audio Language is what the “Use with Foreign Audio” reads from.
So essentially you’re telling it “Preferred Audio Language>English” and the "Use with Foreign Audio checks this field, If the Audio track is English, it does not play Subtitles because you’ve set the audio language to English. If the preferred Audio language is something other than English, it displays subtitles for you.
I think this logic is slightly flawed personally. I would rather the check was against the system language. This way, I could set Japanese as the Audio source, and for all content where Japanese is one of the languages it would play Japanese Audio AND play Subtitles (since my system language is in English) and then for Anything without Japanese Audio it will play the default Audio track which my Library is all English otherwise, and it would play English Audio with no Subtitles…
I think the user should have both options. The current option “Use with Foreign Audio” should be renamed to something like “Use when audio language differs from preferred audio language”. And then a new option like “Use when audio language differs from system audio language” should be added.
Yeah, I mean in an idea world, we would have a track flag for “Original Audio” and then the user could select that, and then check against system language, if Original Audio is not the System Language then play subtitles in system language. That’s the way I’d do it if it was me, but we’re stuck with what we got. So changing the “Use with foreign audio” to check against system language is just a work around that is probably easily changed in the code… anything else would require more arguments and more coding… rather than a field change
I agree. It seems like the behaviour has just been changed from how it worked before and called a “fix”, but the way it is now is very inconvenient. If you watch subbed anime frequently, and you also watch shows in your own language, then the optimal setup was to have it use Japanese audio if it was present, and if it was using any audio track other than your system language it should display subtitles. This made it so you would automatically get Japanese audio + english subs when watching anime, and when watching anything else you would get English audio and no subs.
The way it has been changed to now makes no sense at all and isn’t useful.
I’m assuming someone with an even more minority use case complained about the way it was before and that’s why it has been changed as if it were nothing, but I believe this causes inconvenience for many more people. It would be better to have the flexibility to do it either the new way or the old way, but the old way definitely made more sense for most use cases anyway.
I was the one who complained about the bug and I would say that my use case is more common than yours. But of course that’s a point where we could argue endlessly about, so let’s not start. You can read about my use case here if you want: [BUG - PMS 1.15 regression] Automatic subtitle selection broken
The behavior that PMS 1.16.4.1469 now shows is neither new nor unexpected. It’s not new because older versions of PMS had the same behavior before it was broken in version 1.15. And it’s not unexpected because now it (again) works as documented.
Still, as written in my previous post, your use case is as valid as mine and I support the request that Plex should support both.
Or even better, Plex should support advanced audio/subtitle selection rules like LAV Splitter does. Then you could exactly specify the preferred subtitle language for each audio language.
I’ve been using it this way for a long time though and it’s always worked the same until 1.16.4.1469, so I don’t see how this could have been caused by it simply being reverted to the way it was before.
Please post your exact setup for your language account settings and which audio and subtitle tracks your files have (including the information if the subtitles are internal or external).
Doesn’t this issue affect all the people that watch movies and TV series not in their native language?
Right now I am either forced to set all the language settings manually on each episode of a show, or change the MKV default tracks for each episode so it doesn’t affect anyone else that uses my Plex server (yet it still affects anyone who speaks different language). Really annoying.
I need to be able to set that I don’t want to have Czech subtitles when Czech audio is on, and that I want to have subtitles on when I have my preferred audio language (English) is on. (Or to have Czech subtitles if any other audio language than Czech is playing.)
Doesn’t this issue affect all the people that watch movies and TV series not in their native language?
It depends on which audio language you want to hear if the file has both. If you want to hear your native language (and have configured it as preferred) then Plex works fine (because everything else will be considered “foreign” and show subtitles). But if you want to hear English (and therefore have English as preferred) the current options of Plex don’t allow you to always automatically select the correct subtitles.
so it doesn’t affect anyone else that uses my Plex server
Neither the languages you select on specific files nor your default language settings for automatic selection will affect other users. Both is specific to the current account.
