I’m not sure why I have so many problems with subtitles.
Sometimes they come with a show when its downloaded, sometimes not. Sometimes the subtitles that come with are 100% of all dialogue; sometimes its just the non-English parts. Sometimes the subtitles match the scene, sometimes not. I can never identify which “stream” is all, or just foreign, parts.
When I try to download subtitles using one of the online optics, the subtitles that are retrieved almost never match up with the scene.
Its a giant pain in the rear to have to turn subtitles on for each individual episode, as my parents have to do. They are hard of hearing and it would be cool if their player (Roku) had a default setting that subtitles were on 100% of the time.
Usually media content that is downloaded has no subtitles at all.
I don’t know why this is has been such a huge issue for me, but its been the bane of my Plex experience since Day 1 so many years ago.
Let’s be fair… Plex has nothing to do with the media you download and its lack of subtitle streams. Movies and shows are released in different variations. This can be due to being edited for time/content, different localized opening/closing titles – this is obviously also impacting subtitles.
If you don’t have the original subtitle, there’s always some portion of luck to get a good one from an online source. That’s independent if you’re using an online source of your own or Plex’ on-demand subtitle search.
Plex is capable to differentiate between full subtitles and those only covering foreign-language parts. This will work with your own embedded or local subtitles as well as those derived from online sources (assuming they’re properly named/tagged).
For this to work, you’ll need to properly set your language & subtitle preferences in the account settings of Plex. http://app.plex.tv/desktop#!/settings/account
Those settings will be respected by all Plex clients I’m aware of. From what I’ve learned, the Roku client will require some additional settings on the device itself (Roku settings, not Plex settings).
