Subtitles styling is broken when changing OS subtitles style

Plex Experience Preview
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I’ve posted this before, so I’m trying again with a separate topic on the issue. This applies to both the mobile app (iOS) and the TV App (AppleTV).

Subtitles are rendered incorrectly when any style other than the default one is selected in your device settings.

iOS: settings, accessibility, SDH subtitles, style
ATV: settings, accessibility, subtitles and captioning, style

If you select the first, default option (usually “Transparent Background”) subtitles are rendered correctly:

Default
Default1280×273 57.5 KB

If you change it to something else, like “Outline Text” or any custom style, it goes to a default awful text that doesn’t follow any size, opacity, border or font you set it to. In my case I use the font “Trebuchet” and there is no way to make that work.

This is what I get on iPhone (iOS 16):

Custom, not following rules
Custom, not following rules1280×239 59.2 KB

On iPad (iOS 18) the font is better but still wrong and in all instances, the border is way too small to be useful. This is an iPad comparison between the old and the new app with my font settings:

iPad
iPad719×300 62.2 KB

The result is similar but even worse on AppleTV, where the text is even thinner and basically unreadable:

AppleTV
AppleTV1239×303 51.4 KB

Among the many issues that plague this “New Experience”, this is one of the worst for me as I watch everything with full subtitles enabled. Hope to see this fully fixed.

5 Likes
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Same issue here. Subtitles on Plex Preview Apple TV look awful !

1 Like
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Just updated to v 2025.20.0, issue persist.

Custom style subtitles are still unusable.

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Confirming I am also experiencing this issue. This really needs some eyeballs from the Plex developers.

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@McWanke as it seems you’re the most likely to keep us in the loop here, I would love to at least have an acknowledgement on this issue

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I checked our issue list and didn’t see anything on this, but I will also acknowledge that my search might not have surfaced things correctly, mainly because I am not as familiar with AppleTV. I also just fired up my test rig to try and see what this is, but would like to confirm with you all that I understand this one. For a title I see that I can select different subtitles. For settings I see options for “Burn Subtitles” and “Subtitle Position”. Apologies for having to ask, but where do I go to select a different style?

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No problem. Anyway, as I also said in the main post, on ATV you go through the device settings:

Accessibility > Subtitles and Captioning > Style

I use a custom style with the font “Trebuchet”, but if you select the default one called “Outline Text”, you’ll get the same effect and you’ll clearly see what I’m talking about.

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:doh: I didn’t think to check the accessibility settings. Apologies for not being as familiar with apple stuff, but I do appreciate you helping me out here! Let me dig in here and I will be back later today with an update

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And… back with the update. Found the device accessibility settings, set up a custom style, confirmed this in the latest build. A new ticket has been filed to get this one looked at by the team. Thanks for the report and hopefully we can get this one addressed soon!

2 Likes
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Thanks, at least we have an official ticket now and I’m hopeful it’ll be looked at soon.

This could easily be fixed by just using the default ATV player instead of stubbornly trying to come up with a custom one, which as of right now is unusable for a list of reasons.

But I guess this is not the right topic to discuss it.

2 Likes
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i am experiencing this issue as well, it is not specially unreadable when using the system font (medium)

this makes the new experience plex app almost unusable, and i could find no options to set subtitle settings which is very frustrating.

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The latest tvOS beta seems to handle things better. The Plex Experience app seems to be using its own font face and a different font weight from the tvOS Accessibility configuration, and it’s less readable, BUT at least it’s not tiny anymore.

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Still no good on Apple TV. Any progress on a fix?

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It’s nice to see that this “acknowledged” bug… is still there. Still the same.

Great progress guys.

This is the single most important thing that is stopping me from testing the preview app further on AppleTV.

1 Like