If a user has bold text enabled in their iPhone/iPad system settings on iOS/iPadOS 18, the plex app will not be able to play files with SRT subtitles correctly. Instead, they will appear as boxes and the player will stutter and crash. Please understand that bold text is a very common setting to have enabled on iOS. I’ll reattach logs if needed.
I also note that changing to the old video player in plex settings seems to fix this issue.
I have tested and reproduced with multiple iPhones and iPad.
Thanks for your tips @evdawg . I don’t set bold text on my iphone 14 Pro (IOS 18). Besides, I don’t have any issue on my Apple TV 4K (also upgrade to TVOS 18).
I have the same problem as the blogger above, when upgrading to ios18 (I have ipados18, macos18 also have the same problem), the Chinese subtitles will turn into squares, and it will be extremely laggy when there are squares in the subtitles, the previous version of infuse has the same problem on ios18, but infuse adapted to ios18 in the latest version! But infuse has adapted to ios18 in the latest version. Guess the official plex client hasn’t been modified for ios18’s new api yet, maybe it’s a coding issue!
Same issue here on English .srt files, didn’t realize the Bold setting was causing it. How strange. ASS subtitles seem to be working, but .SRT subtitles are majorly broken, displayed as squares, and cause the video to not play. This is a very major bug, and I hope it is taken seriously.
Edit: looks like a fix will be coming soon, according to the other thread!
Super big thanks for pointing this out! Been pulling my hair out over this for the past 2-3 hours (english subtitles)! What’s odd is that subtitles will still work for certain media, but most of the media will lag/square box text when subtitles are enabled. As you noted, old player will fix this as well.
