Subtitles not displaying

General Discussions
1

When watching a movie with portions that require subtitles, how do you get the subtitles to display? When i turn them on manually, it only displays subtitles for the English speaking sections. Am i missing something here?

2

A bit more explanations please:
What is the main language of the movie?
For which parts do you need subtitles?
How many subtitle streams does it have?
Is one of these labeled as “forced”?

3

Main language of all movies is English. I have several English-speaking movies with portions that are in another language and require subtitles (e.g., Gran Torino, Fury, Inglorious Basterds). Normally on disk, these subtitles are burned in and don’t require any toggling of subtitle settings. But in Plex that do not display automatically. And even when i turn on English subtitles, it only displays subtitles during English dialog. I don’t recall any subtitles saying “forced”, but I’ve tried several different English subtitles and they’re all the same. Also, the subtitles typically lag the movie by several seconds up to over a minute.

4

What you are looking for is often referred to as “forced” subtitles.
These subtitles need to be ripped from the disc. If you see those kinds of subtitles when you play a regular DVD or Bluray in a hardware player, but don’t see them after having ripped the disc, your ripper software is usually to blame.

  1. get https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo
  2. rip your disc with makemkv (google it)
    In its settings tell it to rip all subtitle streams
  3. inspect the ripped file with mediainfo
  4. play the file with a desktop media player like VLC or MPC-HC
    Both support the selection of different subtitle streams. So if there is a subtitle stream (or several thereof) in the file, you can see them there and check them out.
  5. use MKVtoolnixGUI to set the “forced” flag on the appropriate subtitle stream. (Even makemkv messes up here and doesn’t set the flag, so it will often be necessary for you to set it manually.)
  6. If you want to take a look at the subtitle streams directly, download Subtitle Edit. You can determine how many lines each subtitle stream has. The subtitle stream which has significantly less lines than the regular stream(s) is usually the “forced” one.
    (You can also use SubtitleEdit to convert the subtitles into SRT format, which greatly enhances their compatibility with many client types, thus requiring less often a full transcoding on the server when playing them.)

Make sure to set the preferences in https://app.plex.tv/desktop#!/settings/account in this way:
AUDIO & SUBTITLE SETTINGS
Automatically select audio and subtitle tracks
PREFERRED AUDIO LANGUAGE: English
PREFERRED SUBTITLE LANGUAGE: English
AUTO-SELECT SUBTITLE MODE: Shown with foreign audio

5

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.