PMS Not Picking up External .srt Files

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
1

I’m not sure when but PMS has now stopped detecting external .srt files that are stored alongside the media it’s associated with.

Nothing has changed in terms of their location of naming so I can only thing it’s an issue with PMS.

I’ve checked some of my media that have external .srt and I know worked before they have also been stripped when checking in the web player.

It seems to only affect external .srt has I checked media with hardcoded subs and PMS is picking them up fine.

I have tried re-scanning all my media, removing the .srt from the folder, re-adding it, restarting PMS, restarting my media and it still won’t pick it up.

Is anyone else had this issue recently or, if it’s just me, do you need log files from me?

2

PMS still detects them.

  1. The SRT file name follows the same as the movie with addition of language. (e.g. Movie (year).ext uses Movie (year).eng.srt
  2. File permissions must be such that plex can read the file
  3. Local Media Assets agent in the movies tabs must be enabled.

If all are true, please

  1. Scan the library again
  2. Obtain the XML (Hover over item - Get Info - View XML) and paste here, highlighted and then formatted with Code paragraph formatting ^^s
  3. Attach the log file ZIP collected after attempting to play
3

Checked what you suggested and all looks ok.

Re-scanned library and still won’t pick up.

Here is the attached XML and Plex log.

4
  1. Found a minor error with preroll. PMS thinks you specified a file (which appears to be a blank/null name) and doesn’t exist
  2. Nothing in the logs suggests PMS even sees the subtitle file.

Will you please show me your movie and subtitle file names exactly as you have them ? (screenshot or copy/paste best)

5

Here is a screenshot of the filenames:

6

Looks good to me therefore it must be preference settting.

oi0iackq2j0o.png741×365 226 KB 

[/share/movies/Lucy (2014)] # ll -h
total 20516988
drwxr-xr-x    2 chuck    everyone    4.0K Sep 17 00:21 ./
drwxrwxrwx  475 chuck    everyone   24.0K Nov 24 02:39 ../
-rw-r--r--    1 chuck    everyone    3.6K Nov 22  2014 Lucy (2014).eng.forced.srt
-rw-r--r--    1 chuck    everyone   19.6G Jun 23 14:42 Lucy (2014).mkv
-rw-r--r--    1 chuck    everyone    3.6K Jan 24  2017 Lucy (2014).pob.srt
[/share/movies/Lucy (2014)] #
7

I re-checked the preferences again and all were as before. Re-scanned library for good measure for what ever reason, it has decided it now wants to show the external .srt.

Not sure what the issue was but thank you for your time on this. Ghosts in the machine, I think!

8

Greetings, fellow Plex users. I’m posting here in reply to this old question, cause I had a similar issue. Checked the documentation, did all the suggested steps and those in this thread. External subtitles never showed up. Upon arriving on this thread via Google (reason for posting here), I did one additional step, which was going to Languages and enabling automatic selection of subtitles. That made the difference for me and i’m guessing for the original poster as well.

I should add while i’m at it, that there should an explicit option to load external subtitles like in other media software. Ty.

9

Thanks for that feedback but since this is more of a ‘troubleshooting’ area / thread, your feedback is better posted in the Feature Requests area by up-voting one of the requests (it has been requested before)