For the past several versions of plex media server, both plex pass and non, the server has not been able to detect any subtitle files, .srt or .sub, on any movies. Subtitles coded into the .m4v files work, but that’s all. I don’t know if I mest up my settings somewhere, but I can’t figure it out. They used to work and one day they all just disappeared in the server (but not in the individual movie folders). This is true across all my viewing platforms: iOS, FireTV, and plex web. Any suggestions? I’ve tried googling but there seem to be so many other people with single platform issues, or that had problems fixed by updating their server, and I haven’t found any useful information.
Please show an exact example of how your files (including subtitles) are named and structured.
A change was made recently because the Scanner was picking up ‘junk’. In the process, it is slightly less tolerant of names being ‘out of specification’. You might have one of those cases.
Wow, these topics get buried quick, but this certainly helped. Renaming them to just “English.Srt” or “French.srt” fixed the problem. I have to say I’m a little disappointed that the exact same name as the video file + “.srt” does not pick up any more though. One would think it would be pretty clear it isn’t “junk” and it is rather tedious to rename all my subtitle files, which is part of why I love Plex, it just works.
The spec has always called for Name.lng.srt or similar.
When the files are nicely contained in one directory, as in
The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)/
The Spirit of the Beehive (1973).avi
The Spirit of the Beehive (1973).srt
then it’s not so bad.
The ‘junk’ getting pulled in were cases of “English.srt” among hundreds of media files. Which one does it belong with ? It certainly can’t belong to every one.
That’s where it became stricter. The media file base name and the extension file base name needed to match… for just those cases when everything gets dropped into a HUGE bucket (which is very ill advised)
The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)/
The Spirit of the Beehive (1973).avi
The Spirit of the Beehive (1973).srt
but this does work:
The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)/
The Spirit of the Beehive (1973).avi
english.srt
That would seem to be the opposite of the more strict requirements you are talking about.
Edit: except after changing it to “english.srt” it detects the subtitle, and now I can change it back to The Spirit of the Beehive (1973).srt and it still works. I’m guess maybe some kind of database corruption? I’d tried refreshing the library a bunch of times, and removing and re-adding the folders, but that had no effect. Yet, somehow, changing the name in any form does work (I tried just removing a couple letters from another)
Do you think there’s a way to “flush” the database memory of this?
Renaming the subtitle file worked in a many cases, but I have a lot of subtitled movies. It does not appear to be limited to .sub files or .avi files, though they are the examples. Also, after I change the name on others PMS will detect it, but if the library is refreshed again later, PMS will lose them until the name is tweaked in any form again. Those are different from the ones it just will not pick up.
It’s been checked across the board. However, annoying as it is, deleting the library and re-creating it fixed all the ones that would appear on name change and disappear, and even a few others that weren’t detected… at least for now, as I’ve thought they’d been fixed before. I don’t know what caused the problem vanishing/reappearing problem originally, but whatever works I guess.
There are still a few outliers, but at this point I think the . sub files are just corrupt for an unknown reason on the handful that still don’t work (VLC won’t read them either). Unfortunate, as I wanted to watch Le Corbeau, but it’s one of the handful.
Also unfortunate is the vanishing/reappearing seems to be happening in multiple libraries, so I can only assume my database in general is corrupt. It’s going to be a tedious process, so I’ll probably just sit on it and see if the problems don’t reappear in the library I already addressed.
Yeah, that’s what I plan to do. I’ve always found OpenSubtitles annoying though, probably because I’m confused by the 120x and 47x and all the ?x speeds, and there are invariably ones that don’t match up well, and I honestly just feel like I’m just guessing every time. Thanks for all the advice though ChuckPa, much appreciated.
