it says the following regarding subtitle settings:
Note : If you ever manually change the audio or subtitle track for an item in a personal Plex Media Server library (either during playback or on the preplay screen), that manual selection will always override any automatic selection (see below) that would have otherwise happened. Once you manually select something, it will never automatically change again.
If at some point a subtitle has been manually selected for a movie, is there a way to “reset” the subtitle setting for that movie so that it reverts back to the behavior as set in Audio & Subtitle Settings?
There’s no option to trigger this in the user interface.
It’s possible to dig into the database and delete the related records – but you’ll do that at your own risk and if you do it wrong you can mess up the database (e.g. if modifying while the server is running) or break your setup (e.g. if you delete the wrong records or even tables).
I don’t know if there’s an API call / URL command to unset the audio/subtitle track selection.
Only a full Plex dance can clear this. But that seems to be a bit drastic.
Keep in mind that it is only stored for the user account who did the manual stream selection – i.e. only for you.
It doesn’t affect any other user(s) with whom you may be sharing your videos.
I think I figured out how to do it. I just removed the movie from Plex (moved it temporarily to an Extras folder), ran Optimize Database and Clean Bundles, and then moved the movie back into Plex. It seems like that reset it and caused it to start using the subtitle settings in Audio & Subtitle Settings.
A bit of background. I was playing around with tagging forced subtitles in the MKV, and specifically what happens if you tag multiple subtitles as forced (each language has their own forced subtitle). In testing this in Plex, I discovered that after manually selecting a subtitle and then switching the subtitle back to None for the movie in Plex, it was no longer showing the forced subtitles automatically. That is when I came across the above article explaining why that was happening. After “resetting” the movie, it’s now showing forced subtitles again even when subtitles is set to None.
Follow up: I forgot to mention that I also scanned the library after removing the movie, but before optimizing database and cleaning bundles. I guess you could say I did a semi Plex dance, but it only took a few minutes and wasn’t a big deal.
That’s why there is a language selector for subtitles in each user’s account settings.
As long as both the audio and the subtitle streams are properly tagged with language and “forced” tags, even users with differing language preferences. As long as your movies have at least subtitle streams in all the required languages of your users.
Right, I understood the behavior. In my case, under my profile I was testing to make sure each language behaved as expected. However, once I was done testing, I wanted it to revert back to the behavior I specified for my profile in Audio & Subtitle Settings. It wasn’t doing that since I had manually selected the subtitles. I wanted to know how I could reset it so it would honor my settings in Audio & Subtitle Settings instead. The steps I took above seems to have reset the setting and now its honoring the settings I specified under Audio & Subtitle Settings in my profile.
