Subtitles no longer display on IOS or Roku players if the file is an MKV, even though subtitles are enabled by default. However, if played from the web browser the subtitles display properly. An interesting side-effect when playing on the IOS / Roku players is when you go to the playback settings and select the subtitle stream manually it states the subtitle is Off. If you manually select a subtitle or choose one from Opensubtitles, the player acts like it was selected and when you return to the movie, no subtitle is displayed. Then when you go back to the subtitle selection, it again shows the subtitle is Off. Thus, it ignored or lost the previous setting. The only workaround I’ve found thus far is manually transcoding the MKV to MP4 and extracting the SRT from the MKV, but this is a huge pain in the backside for the multitude of movies in my collection. I recall s few versions back, Plex Media Server was able to deal with some MKVs without issue, but now Plex no longer works at all with subtitle streams. Is there any chance you will get these working again?
I’ve tried displaying multiple subtitle formats. ASS, Vobsub, SRT, PGS. I’ve tried original quality and transcoding. Subtitles aren’t loading with either.
I have Burn Subtitles set to Auto.
Players I’ve tried: Web frontend, Plex app (the new one, not Plex Media Player which also doesn’t work), Nvidia Shield beta app.
Why are subtitles not loading all of the sudden? I’ve checked all the subtitle settings I can think of, server and player. Nothing makes them load for me.
I’ve used Plex for over a decade with the same library since. I’ve never had this problem.
Seeing a few posts in the forums about this in the last few days. I think this is not an isolated issue.
It would seem this is a longstanding issue with a forum thread assigned to an employee that no longer works for Plex (Which may be why it has never been looked at):
Everyone has been crying out to Plex team members to take a look at this issue for well over a year.
Not an employee, just a Plexian running into all these issues and having to reseach and test for hours to solve them. This happened to me a few times in the last couple of months, as I don’t watch that many foreign films anymore. But I noticed that the subtitles were selected, just not displaying, and this happened on a remote Nvidia Shield as well as my primary Android mobile device.
My solution, and it sucks, but works, is to change your client settings for subtitles to Always Burn In. Yes, it will transcode even if on the local network, but there is obviously an issue where the CPU (which handles the subtitles (don’t ask me why, I’m not THAT technical)) and the GPU are not communicating properly (pure guess). So the issue I ran into now is that if any 4K DV HEVC content with subtitles is playing, it buffers every 5 seconds, even on the local network. Remove the subtitles and its fine, but not a permanent solution. What has worked better is changing the subtitle setting in the client app to Only Advanced Formats, which prevents Plex from transcoding the movie purely due to having subtitles active. The problem remains though if you have a 4K DV HEVC file with one of the advanced subtitle formats, but I think that is somewhat unlikely based on my very limited knowledge of whst these subtitle formats are.
