I try to make everything “just work” for my non-technically gifted managed users, which means choosing the right audio and subtitle track. To do this for every managed user one-by-one is tedious, so I would appreciate a simple way to set this for every managed user at once.
You’re probably talking about embedded .ass subtitles. Plex can’t do everything for you. It relies on the quality of the metadata.
If you don’t want to use the .ass subs, them remux the video without them. It takes seconds.
How are your regular and forced subtitles named?
How’s the language profile of your user?
I believe that’s not possible, but it isn’t also a chore if you’re sharing your server with just a handful of people.
Not exactly sure what you’re bumping about… if you had more questions on CostaHT’s response it’ll be good if you could articulate those.
I tend to agree with CostaHT that you’re expecting too much from Plex. If you dump “bad files” that don’t meet your expectations on your server, Plex won’t magically make “good files” out of them. Setting the audio/subtitle preferences for your managed users won’t change the ASS subtitles to SRT.
It takes a few seconds to verify if a file is ok / to adjust the track metadata or at worst to remux it (maybe a few minutes in the latter case).
CostaHT’s response was pointless and I don’t want the thread to be closed.
This is not what I’ve been asking for. I want to set the audio+subtitles for me and all my managed users, without 3rd party tools. I only gave an example, this has nothing to do with ASS subtitles.
If you need another example consider this:
You dump a movie with all bells and whistles (“Remux”), meaning you get every audio and subtitle track (correctly tagged and all). Now, based on your preferences, Plex decides what audio track to pick, and possible also enables the forced subtitles in your language. A non-techie managed user tries to play that movie, but because the forced subtitles are enabled, and because they are VOBSUB, which the client device cannot play, Plex has to transcode the video. This is bad because you have a Raspberry Pi server, which lacks hardware transcoding support (has been requested for one and a half years now), so you try to avoid transcoding at all costs. To do that, you manually convert the VOBSUB to SRT and place it besides your video and refresh the metadata afterwards. Now, because you want to be extra careful and you know that another managed user could use the same “no VOBSUB support” client, you decide that you might as well set it to that SRT for every one of your managed users. Now multiply that by 6 for every managed users, and multiply that by every episode in your favorite TV show and also don’t forget, every movie you’re going to add, and you might start to see that it’s becoming increasingly tedious. If only Plex had a simple way of just doing that once for every user… That would be quite helpful.
Well… you could have said just that – probably in a little more elaborate way. Calling features “dumb” and users attempts to help pointless isn’t a particularly positive way of actually getting help (especially if the response specifically included an answer that setting the audio/subtitles for other users isn’t currently possible).
To be fair – with all the paragraphs about bad files, bad subtitle formats and your resulting hiccups with the audio preferences, it’s easy to miss that part of your question. If this is supposed to be a feature suggestion, let’s flag it as such… though I’m not sure if yours is a particularly widespread use case.
→ done.
That’s why I chose to just ignore that “helpful” comment.
It’s not dumb as in bad, but dumb as in “lacking human intuition”. Dumb as in “would require a lot more if’s and then’s” to be considered smart.
I edited it down to a minimum. Although, you know, the original title literally was “Set subtitles (and audio) for all managed users”, which is pretty self-explanatory. I was merely giving a real-world example, because I knew that people would just say “just do it by hand, it doesn’t take much time”, which is unhelpful advice. Why do people use calculators? Just calculate in your head, it doesn’t take much time.
It wasn’t originally meant as a feature suggestion. I was trying to start a discussion about ways to make my life easier. But it makes sense to put it there.
If you have embedded subs and external subs which are in the same language, the external sub will be selected first/automatically.
(provided they are also the same in regard to the “forced” attribute)
I’m not sure about the audio for myself but I really like the idea of a global default for subtitles for managed users. Users can still change this preference on their account/profile, but for those foreign audio parts it would be nice to set it for all my F&F. I hate getting into a movie and hit that part where they’re explaining something in another language and I gotta go turn it on. I’d like to save my F&F from that as a convenience. I created a post on this and yours didn’t come up in the suggested posts. Global Subtitle Setting
Yeah I wish lol. While that’s definitely true, the technical know-how of my family members / managed users ends at the Play button. If I don’t set the correct subtitles myself, I’m going to get complains that the movie was bad because they couldn’t understand the foreign part of it or whatever. Automatic doesn’t always work, and manually setting it for every user is tedious.
Hopefully Plex liststens and gives as a simple Set for all users checkbox.
Agreed, that statement wasn’t criticism of your ask. It was stating the obvious to those who know it. Having a global default for these settings makes sense. After all, the objective is to provide a great experience with the tool, this is one area where it is lacking.
Now that I have shared my server with a family member who has his own account, I realized that what I was asking is not enough. I can’t even change the settings on his account, which of course is fine because it’s his own, but now none of my movies have subtitles.
So I’ve decided to modify the title to include two things:
- Set a default (global) audio/subtitle track for anyone having access to my server (what Davisar5 was suggesting)
- Change the audio/subtitle track for all users at once (or to give more control to the “receiver” make it so it’s for managed users only)
I hope this will happen at some point because some movies are unwatchable without subtitles, but I’m not holding my breath.
You can already do that for your managed users, by doing “Switch User” and practically impersonate them.
The keyword here is
It gets tedious.
So anyway, I can’t really wait for 10+ years (or however long it takes) for Plex to implement this simple, administrative “feature”, so I’ve decided to finally give in and set it to automatic.
But, of course, it’s not really “automatic” and so I have to introduce even more workarounds to make it work, but atleast I’ll have to do it only once:
- Enables any subtitle even though it’s set to “Forced only”.
Workaround: Create an empty SRT so that gets chosen instead. - Doesn’t work when the subtitles are embedded but not properly tagged.
Workaround: Not really the fault of the auto picker, but because I’m forced to go this route, I’ll have to extract the subtitle and tag it myself. - Prefers external forced image-based over internal forced text-based subtitles.
Workaround: Extract internal SRT. - Prefers external forced image-based over external forced text-based subtitles.
Workaround:Hide external forced image-based subtitles.This seems to be related to the order in which Plex loads the files (which is dumb because there text subtitles should be prioritized), so first move the image-based subtitles, refresh, readd them and it should hopefully still select the text-based subtitle.
These are only a few bad cases I’ve came across, and there’re probably plenty more. In the end, I’ll make it work, but I sure wish that Plex would try harder to give it’s users more control.
Another issue I found:
- The auto picker gets stuck on any full subtitle track (even when forced subtitles in your preferred language are provided) when the audio language isn’t your preferred language. This could happen on badly tagged files (e.g.
und/undefined) or for a language that you understand (like your mother’s tongue) and don’t wish to see subtitles for.
Workaround: Can’t seem to find a reasonable solution to this besides remuxing the file without the subtitles.
Edit: Don’t know if this was fixed in a recent update (probably not) but I finally got it “unstuck” and am able to use my previous workaround (creating an empty SRT).
I went through all of my movies and ensured that the auto picker actually works and I’m finally done.
If you’re in the same situation as me, and you were manually setting the audio/subtitle track before but decided to enable automatic: Run this command if you wish to remove all customizations regarding audio/subtitle tracks:
sudo /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex\ SQLite "/var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plug-in Support/Databases/com.plexapp.plugins.library.db" "DELETE FROM media_part_settings"
If you only want to remove your own settings, add a WHERE account_id=1.
Now the only thing left to do is to wait for Plex to step up and fix their “automatic” audio/subtitle mode. Nothing else I can do besides reporting the issues.
One thing that I didn’t even think about is that the audio/subtitle settings of friends are actually stored on your own server. I’ve always assumed that they’d be tied to your account or something but no, the entries are in my media_part_settings. This is one SQL injection away from disaster, but I guess that just means that you should be careful about who you’re sharing with.
This means that I could’ve kept going with manually setting my own audio/subtitle settings and then just syncing them to all other users via a script (now that I understand how they’re stored, I don’t need to wait on Plex anymore), but oh well. Automatic is probably still easier in the long run (even though I’ll have to jump through a bunch of hoops to make it “automatic”).
Anyway, could a mod please split off the last 4 replies (including this one) and turn them into a proper bug report (maybe call it “Fix the automatic subtitle mode” or something). It’s not really related to the original feature request; just random thoughts about how I solved Plex’ shortcomings. Thinking about it, I believe that this request should remain open, but I won’t be voting for this, because I personally don’t need it anymore.
They are just mirrored in there. If the user changes it in his account, it will be updated in the database file.
@OttoKerner Since it’s seems that you fell victim to the bystander effect, I’m just gonna ping you directly then.
A new bug I’ve recently discovered, but didn’t want to disclose to you before, is pretty weird. It goes like this: I have my (properly tagged) media. I’ve set my (and my managed user’s) audio and subtitle language to my preferred language, and this particular movie has an audio track in that language. The movie also has a subtitle track in that language, but those are “full” (= non-forced) subtitles. Because I have my subtitles settings set to Always enabled, Plex thinks “Even though this movie is already in the preferred language, I’ll still enable the subtitles because they are also in the preferred language” (Plex is not smart enough to only select forced subtitles automatically). Alright, not a big deal: I’ll just create an empy SRT, tag it appropriately (Movie.<lang>.forced.srt) and refresh the metadata. This time Plex decides to select the forced subtitles.
I can see in the logs that this has happend. I can see in the dashboard that the external forced SRT was selected. I can even see in the player itself, opening the subtitle settings, that the external SRT is selected. But it will still show the full subs while playing! This only happens for one user (all users share the same settings), and only for a handful of movies (meaning it doesn’t even happen for each movie this workaround has been deployed for). It gets even weirder: The full subtitles are VOBSUB, and my client can’t even direct play/stream those (it will always transcode). So yeah, apparently the Fire TV can’t handle VOBSUBs, but will still play them just fine when it’s not being told to.
Recreating this scenario on another Android device will not display that same behaviour. It’s only this one user, on this one device. This is the kind of bug that will be awful to debug and maybe impossible to recreate (no it’s not fixable by resetting/deleting the app). I’ve already ordered another Fire TV just to test this one thing, and as I said, I haven’t even reported this before, because I know for d*** sure that nobody is going to help me with this. I’ve reported countless bugs to you guys, and exactly zero have been fixed so far.
Anyway, this isn’t supposed to be a bug report anyway, I was just trying to say that the automatic mode is pretty terrible and that your devs should focus more on the player side of things instead of pointless features nobody has asked for. And even though it sucks for me, I can see how this is not a priority: After all, it’s fixable by manually disabling the subtitles. It’s just that I shouldn’t have to. Or simply put: Plex tries to be like the other streaming platforms, but fails to account for the “tech beginners” (aka parents).
I call that “working as designed”.
If you set it like that, you will get “full” subtitles.
The other issue, where subtitle tracks which haven’t been selected are shown instead, is already being investigated. This is a general issue on all Android TV clients.
1 Like
I was going to bump this today to prevent it from getting closed but since I’ve worked around the original problem and technically don’t need this “feature” anymore, I’ll just let it run out.
Well, the original problem was “I’m trying to lose weight” and Plex offered a saw. So the choice is really “Cut off your arm” or “Cut off your leg”, both of which get the job done but not as efficient as possible.
Edit: Thinking more about this, there are certain movies with e.g. multiple synchronisations and usually the first track is set to “Default”. If I prefer a different version, I can either modify the file and retag it (which I avoid because I want 1:1 backups) or change it inside Plex. But then I have the problem that I can change that for my managed users (they wouldn’t even know that there is a “better” audio track), but not for my friends. The workaround is creating a new container with only the video and the preferred track (to save space). But this is obviously not ideal as the duplicated data is wasteful.
The proper solution would be:
