So, I have been fighting this battle for awhile and cant seem to find a good solution… I’m sure there is one I just am too dense to find it apparently.
I’m trying to get plex when I play a movie to show the correct subtitles for foreign translation only…
I used to encode my movies with the burn in option but then I realized when I had the regular subtitles on that I ran into problems with 2 sets of subtitles on top of each other, and unfortunately they were offset so it was really annoying.
Of course just never adding the regular english subtitles would be an option but I like having them for when I dont understand something or for when Im in a loud room
My next attempt was to simply try the default option on the foreign parts tract That works wonderfully if I play the movie on my computer in VLC, however plex doesnt seem to respect my default option. If I turn on subtitles in plex server settings it seems to want the full subtitles on, which is not what I want.
I have NOT tried the forced only checkbox yet… thats my next move but I figured I would ask in here first… whats the best solution for my problem? I would love a way to make it listen to the default option on subtitles but dont know how to do that.
Thank you.
After more research it appears that id be fine with my current practice of clicking default, if afterwords in mkvtoolnik, i edit the finshed mkv, and whichever subtitle track i clicked as default i then edit it to also be forced.
Is that correct or is there more to it than that? For instance do server settings need to be altered, and if not, then would subtitles set as off by default in the server settings be ok?
In MKVtoolnix, put the ‘forced’ flag on those subtitle tracks, which only contain translations for foreign languages. Do also assign the proper language tag to both the audio and the subtitle tracks.
read on how to activate those automatically: https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/comment/1267835/#Comment_1267835
I’ll give that a try, thanks
Another question for ya, off topic… when encoding with handbrake have you guys ever had a movie that would occasionally go wonky… like a scene or 2 here and there would look as if they are teh negative image of what is suppose to be there.
What causes this? was I using too much of my PCs ram or something at that moment… cause I do still use other programs and let handbrake work in the background
@wilsontray said:
Another question for ya, off topic… when encoding with handbrake have you guys ever had a movie that would occasionally go wonky… like a scene or 2 here and there would look as if they are teh negative image of what is suppose to be there.
What causes this? was I using too much of my PCs ram or something at that moment… cause I do still use other programs and let handbrake work in the background
I can imagine 2 causes:
- the source file is defective.
- you are encoding with too many ‘Reference frames’ for the target playback device
On what type of Plex client do you experience these kinds of artefacts?
What parameters do you use in Handbrake? Are you using some nifty custom video codec parameters?
My parameters are: H.265, constant 30 framerate, Quality: RF 20, and medium speed, the rest are auto or none
I leave the picture, filter, and chapters alone. The Audio I do auto passthru so I should get the original audio unedited. Subtitles I talked about in the original post
as for the source… its ripped from the bluray with makemkv… havent checked that file though cause usually I dont find out about the problems till well after I delete it… its hard to spot check for 5-6 random frames in a movie of thousands…especially if you dont know theres a problem since 9 times out of 10 my encodes are just fine 
When you encode to H.265, all bets are off. This encoder is not mature enough, yet.
And if you use these files in Plex, they will in an awful lot of situations get transcoded when played. Which degrades the quality further.
