.Srt with .mp4

General Discussions
1

Hi

I’ve been trying and trying again and again to make that work, but I just can’t and that just drives me nuts…

  • Plex server, up to date, runs on my Synology DS214Play
  • Plex client runs, up to date, on my Samsung TV

I have movies in different format, always with .srt subtitles as english is not my mother tongue but I just hate watching dubbed movies and my english understanding and earing is good enough forme to watch movies/tv. I need the subs, in english, every now and then when the ambiance gets messy, lower etc etc etc…

So, many of my movies have subs detected. But some, for some reason, refuse to show up…

The agents are correctly set (works for other movies):
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Naming is correct (works for other movies)
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Another movie, same format shows correctly (even though, for some weird reason, it says “unknown” for the subs):
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But this movie (and others) does not…
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They don’t show on my tv, on the web client, nowhere. On my computer I can select the srt file when watching with vlc or Microsoft Movie, and they work…

So I went further, and compared the files themselves…

Non working:
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Working:
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So file magic numbers do match, header and trailer

So let’s compare encoding:

Non working:
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Working:
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Yes I did refresh the movie:
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And it doesn’t change anything. Yesterday I refreshed my whole library, doesn’t change anything either. So, I’m a bit out of ideas… How do I manually set the subtitles? Any way to add them to the DB? The DB is surely something like sqlite or a simple xml struts?

I know I can use an agant to download the subs, but it tends to download subs that aren’t in sync, sometimes with over 20 seconds and for some weird reason, you can only adjust 10 seconds in plex, not more (WTF, WHY???)

Can anyone help further?

2

@Psychokiller1888 said:
So, many of my movies have subs detected. But some, for some reason, refuse to show up…
Naming is correct (works for other movies)
image

No, it is not.
First: the release year of a movie is to be set in round parentheses, not square brackets to be of any use for proper matching.
Second:
Your movie file name contains .en at the end.
But the subtitle requires to be named exactly like the movie, plus the language code.
For the subtitle to be shown as ‘english’ it then needs to be

Zootopia (2016) - [any other stuff].en.mp4
Zootopia (2016) - [any other stuff].en.en.srt

go also over to ‘Personal Media’ and to ‘TheMovieDatabase’ and verify, ‘Local Media Assets’ is there checked, too.
(It does not need to be in the top position. You might wanna avoid that actually, to prevent embedded incorrect title tags to mess up the matching.)

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I’d go with UTF-8 without BOM.

Check for any folder names or files which contain special characters, like ó ì ä ô etc pp.
Even when they appear in file’s names which only sit beside the actual movie files, they could prevent the ‘Local Media Assets’ agent from picking up the subtitle.

3

Ok, it is not then, thank you for you answer first of all… But how do you explain it works for others then?

Release year in square brackets does not change anything, Plex did not invent the conventions as far as I know :slight_smile: Square brackets are always used by engine to add informations you don’t want the crawlers to replace. XBMC was using everything between square brackets, explaining why I kept that habit. Thanks to your poiting I will change that habit then. But that’s another topic, let’s not open a debate for that.

Now for the sake of debugging and to finally find a solution, I have done the following:

  • Checked that the other agents are turned on, didn’t bother screening that, sorry, they were

  • Renamed to
    image

  • I have taken the BOM away

  • There is no folder or file with special characters sitting in my movie folder

4

Then there is only the way of examining log files.

  1. activate debug logging (not ‘verbose’!)
  2. quit Plex Server
  3. wait 1 minute
  4. empty the log folder
  5. start Plex Server
  6. wait 2 minutes
  7. either refresh one movie or add one movie into your library
  8. wait 3 minutes
  9. go to the preplay page of this movie and play it for ~ 1 minute
  10. shut down Plex server
  11. wait 1 minute
  12. zip up the whole log folder and attach it here
5

Will do that now, thx.

Meanwhile, because I was in the logs already, the srt file is found be Plex…

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6

@Psychokiller1888 said:
Meanwhile, because I was in the logs already, the srt file is found be Plex…
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You might wanna try the method of one subfolder per movie, if you add ‘sidecar’ files.

/volume1/video/Movies
   /Zootopia (2016)
      Zootopia (2016) [allotherstuff].mp4
      Zootopia (2016) [allotherstuff].en.srt

this helps ruling out other files interfering.

7

Here are the logs. The refresh is on line 704… Still no subs. Will try the one subfolder per movie now

8

Well, finally at least a good news… I have tried to put Zootopia in its own subfolder along with the subs… And it is now showing at least… Well, lemme try with others that are not working and edit this post accordingly

EDIT
Ok, seems to solve the problem for every movies I had problem with from top of my list to bottom, no alphabetical logic (fileinput). Tried about 8-10 movies and it seems ok, afterthe auto refresh the subs appear normally on the movie detail

That raises 2 points:

  • Why does it do that, meaning debugging
  • Add a manual file selection forthese case, feature request

I would like to thank you @OttoKerner for pointing me into the correct direction.

9

The logfile from the ‘Local Media Assets’ agent shows it is taking exception to a file name with the letter
http://www.charbase.com/00e7-unicode-latin-small-letter-c-with-cedilla
You must have a file or folder name with that letter somewhere in your /volume1/video/Movies folder.

10

And once again you are correct…

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Couldn’t see it by eyes, but Agent Ransack found it…