Subtitle detection too limited

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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Server Version#: latest
Player Version#: latest

Hi, ChatGPT says

You’ve remembered correctly: Plex used to be much looser with local subtitle detection, but in its current form (especially with the Docker images, which are usually very up-to-date), it enforces stricter naming rules.

…

So if you put videoname.en.MYSUFFIX.srt, Plex will not recognize it, because MYSUFFIX is not one of the supported tokens (forced, default, sdh, etc.). It will just silently ignore the file.

Why?! Jellyfin and Emby both support this and its way better this way for obvious reasons.

Any way to fix this, any workaround?

Only workaround I can think of is abusing some of the ISO_639_language_codes to add custom subtitles…

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What exactly are you asking for? It’s not entirely clear to me from this post.

You can see our documentation here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200471133-adding-local-subtitles-to-your-media/ and avoid having ChatGPT possibly giving you bad information.

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Yes, but I tested it and also compared the behavior with the documentation:

If I put videoname.en.MYSUFFIX.srt , the file will be ignored and is not appearing in the Plex media player.

The subtitle files need to follow the exact pattern: videoname.en.srt , otherwise they will be ignored. But in certain cases one might want to add subtitles which have some suffix. Is that possible and if yes how?

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It should work exactly as the documentation describes.

Can you give an exact example of what your files look like (the video and subtitle files)?

5

I understand that OP is trying to add a kind of description or name of the particular subtitle.

That is something that is only possible in Plex with internal subtitles in mkv files. The “title” tag can be used for this kind of thing.

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Thanks, after a restart of the (docker) plex server, the issue was magically resolved (its weird because I had the same issue with an installation on ubuntu via snap but there a restart/refresh or anything else did not help).

Folder structure was like this (I tried many things…):

starwars4.en.forced.srt
starwars4.en.srt
starwars4.en_synced.srt
starwars4.en.forced_synced.srt
starwars4.mkv

Only one subtitle file (probably “starwars4.en.srt”) was found.

After the restart of the (docker) service it found them, but they got shown as “xx (SRT EXTERNAL)”. But this might have been caused by the library configuration.

After recreating the library they got shown as “English (SRT EXTERNAL)”.

My next question would be how to add a name to differentiate between these, but @OttoKerner already answered this. Very unfortunate that it is not possible, but then I have to live with it… Thank you :slight_smile:

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