On my server, under languages, I have the subtitle mode set to manually selected.
I’ve ripped all of our media using MakeMKV and transcoded everything using Handbrake. I only recently realized that Handbrake was flagging subtitles ripped from DVDs and “default.” When playing media back locally, because of the subtitle mode selected, no subtitles are every selected by default.
I created managed users for my parents and my brother for them to have access to my Plex server. When they playback any media that was ripped from DVDs, subtitles are automatically selected and are burned in. The video is transcoding anyway, so I’m not worried about that, but they would have to manually disable subtitles every time when they shouldn’t be playing anyway.
My brother is using a Roku and my parents are using a Fire TV. I looked at the settings for the Fire TV tonight and don’t see anything about subtitles other than whether they should be burned in and then some settings for how they are displayed.
I haven’t bothered calling to go over the setting on the Roku, but I know they don’t have them turned on in the actual Roku settings.
Why would Plex respect this setting locally, but not remotely?
Audio and sub settings are per account, not per server. Each user “account” can set the desire setting. This includes all Managed Users aswell.
Click HERE and select the Manage User.
So out of curiosity, what are the other subtitle settings under: Settings>Languages ? Why have 2 spots for language and subtitles selection if it’s per account? Just curious, as I’d like to know more…
Did some more testing and discovered both settings will change PlexWeb & Plex apps(Roku app at least) behavior.
Though, I can tell you that Settings>Languages is only available to users that have a plex server.
I can only assume that the topic came up in discussion and it was decided to allow every account the ability to manage their own audio/sub settings.
Hence the setting via link above. I guess there is no need in detecting if you own a server and disabling one of the settings.
Guess now the Setting>Languages setting is just a evolutionary leftover, lol…
Yep and this actually makes sense.
Setting the server to my native English is fine to a point but per account makes far more sense.
So if watching a German movie like Sophie Scholl Plex knows that I’m gonna be needing the English subs.
For my German-speaking friend having those English subs on by default would be pretty pointless and annoying.
Meanwhile, neither of us are particularly fluent in Klingon or Dothraki so the forced subs setting handle that too.
It can’t always be said but Plex really nailed this.
I’m sure in the years to come and the dev’s feel confident the path they took in the app.plex.tv hosted setting they may remove the other(maybe)… Cause something is to be said for “offline” choices. Without it, the server admins out there would have to go “online” to administer that server setting…
I think you’re mostly correct… My issue comes with Anime. While I am a native English speaker, and currently learning Japanese, I still need English Subtitles because I am not fluent and prefer my Anime in Japanese.
So Ideally, I’d like the “Shown with Foreign Audio” to actually check against the Language setting and not the “Preferred Audio Language” setting. Because then I could select my preferred audio language as Japanese, this way I didn’t have to fiddle with each episode. This would accomplish:
My English content plays fine without subtitles as there’s no Japanese audio tracks
My Anime auto-selects Japanese Audio and Displays English Subtitles
Currently, for the anime that I have that is Dual Audio, most of it is set to English as the first track and it’s also usually the default track. Rather than going through the 400+ episodes that are like this and stripping the English Audio, or moving it to the second track and removing the default flags, it would be much easier if Plex handled this on its own, and simply changing which “language” field the “Display with foreign audio” looks at would accomplish that.
Yeah, I am actually going to be just batch processing all of my anime into x265 (to save space), and in that process I am going to setup Handbrake to only use Japanese Audio Tracks and burn in the English Subtitles… But this is going to take a while.
I tested with several TV Shows I’ve been recording. I’m direct playing all x265 content on my primary devices… When I use soft subtitles, it transcodes, but that’s why I’ll be burning them in
