Server Version#: 1.13.8.5395-10d48da0d (running on a raspberry Pi 3B+)
Player Version#: 7.7.2.7701
The desired behavior I’d like is for all shows, movies, etc. to automatically fetch and show subtitles for the default language set (english), or use embedded english subtitles if available.
I have done the following:
- Enabled opensubtitles.org with a working account, and it is the first agent for both movies and TV.
- Set subtitles to “always on” with english as the only default language.
- Ran the database optimization/scan library files/clean bundles
After all this, no subtitles seem to display automatically unless there happened to be an embedded english subtitle that came with the file, and most of the time this only works with movies.
When I go to play a show that streams from the server to a chromecast, using my Pixel 2 plex app as a remote control, there seems to be only one specific way to get subtitles to download through the agent search -
- Go to the “info” page of the episode/movie (that displays the synopsis, writer/director information)
- Tap subtitles field
- Tap “more”
- Wait for search results to appear from the subtitle search agents
- Tap on a result
- Wait for the check mark to appear that it has downloaded
- If an error displays “something went wrong downloading subtitles…” try again
- Tap the back arrow
- Confirm that the subtitles field isn’t still stuck on “none” (i.e., your selected subtitles actually downloaded)
- Hit the play button.
- After media playback starts, pause it.
- Tap the gear icon
- “Subtitles” will display “none” even though I have a downloaded SRT file from the agent - tap this field.
- Select the downloaded SRT.
- Tap the back arrow.
- Tap “play”.
After all these steps, the subtitles often still don’t display, and if I pause playback and tap the gear icon again, it shows the selected subtitles as “none” again, as if I hadn’t selected them just 20 seconds ago. Even though I have plex set to ALWAYS display subtitles if available, and to automatically select the subtitles reported as english.
This is infuriating! I would think after all those settings to automatically retrieve subtitles after a database scan or even manually selecting every episode, it would at least “stick” for the one episode I did it manually for. I can’t even get the subtitles to display after I’ve done it manually for the episode, with automatic settings backing the thing I did manually.
What’s going on here? I’m not even doing this with an obscure show, Parks and Rec has plenty of subtitle files out there and it never works as a test for this feature.
Sometimes I can get subtitles to start playing with other shows when manually selected, but after playing through that episode, if I were to come back to it tomorrow, I’d have to manually select and download the subtitles again - Plex doesn’t seem to cache the ones it has downloaded with the respective video files.
Am I missing a setting somewhere? It seems like I’ve done everything possible to tell Plex to just display subtitles in any circumstance by either retrieving them off the internet or using embedded subtitles, and even then manually select on top of that… and still no dice for a lot of shows. The setting just gets erased or doesn’t “catch” when manually selected.
For shows that aren’t working in the chromecast context, when I go to do the same in a chrome web stream on an x86 desktop, the subtitle agent under “more” still shows a checkmark against the SRT file it found indicating it downloaded, but when you go to select from a list of options under “none”, it doesn’t show the external SRT as an option, whether nor not I’m playing the video or have it paused.
This would seem to indicate it’s a problem with the server’s handling of SRTs with the video stream, and not the particular playback client or that client’s ability to do direct streaming. I’ve also pre-transcoded all the video files so that the Pi is not doing any “live” transcoding - all the work it has to do is stream the video file and coordinate the subtitle streaming with that playback which is a trivial extra load considering I’m only streaming to a single client at a time, ever.
