Windows Player does not display external subtitles

Plex Players Desktop Players
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Windows Plex Player does not display at all external subtitles. The same subtitles are diplayed using the Web Player.
Please note that the Windows Plex Player displays correctly subtitles embedded in the media files.

My environment is: docker server (latest tag, version.txt contents are: 1.18.3.2156-349e9837e), The media files are xxx.mp4 or xxx.mkv with external subtitles in the same folder as xxx.el.srt The subtitle files are utf-8 encoded with byte order mark. The subtitles are diplayed correctly using VLC and the Web Plex Player. But are not diplayed at all when using the latest Windows Plex Player on Windows 10.

Server Version#: docker 1.18.3.2156-349e9837e
Player Version#: 1.4.1 on Windows 10

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Not of much help here, since not using that player, but

Try to avoid BOM

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Use the 1.5 preview version instead: Plex for Windows and Plex for Mac forum preview releases

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I tryed the new version but the problem remains. (I tried with refreshed metadata and with a new movie to be sure).
The BOM is unrelated, the web versions displays the subtitles either with or without BOM and the Windows versions ignores them all.

To reproduce the problem just add one extrnal srt side by side to a movie, name it movie.el.srt and select it, you must be able to select it as (SRT External) but the contents are not diplayed.

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Try this: in Windows 10 there is a new setting in the Windows control panel under
Languages - Administrative Options - Language for Unicode-compatible apps - “Beta: use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support”
Activate it, then restart Windows and the plex player app.

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No, the problem persists.

Enabled the “Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worlwide language support” option in the Region/Language for non-Unicode programs/Change system locale, restarted, Rescanned and refreshed metadata.

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I also had this problem and figured out a workaround.

I checked the logs for the client and it turns out Plex for Windows only tries to receive subtitles once and then gives up. In my case it was querying 10-40-42-250.xxx.plex.direct:32400. Since my local DNS server prevents external DNS servers from returning internal IP addresses (10.x.x.x), the query was being dropped and plex fails to load the subtitles since it does not retry any additional server names.

Do you use a firewall like pfSense/opnsense? If you do, check if you can disable DNS rebind checks to allow these queries through for now.

EDIT:
Actually, if you want to leave DNS rebinding on, see the details on this page, maybe it’ll help: https://support.plex.tv/articles/206225077-how-to-use-secure-server-connections
(scroll to DNS Rebinding)

2 Likes
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Thank you very much @RedTopper
My DNS server logs are full with: possible DNS-rebind attack detected: xxxxxx.plex.direct
Allowing plex.direct DNS server to serve internal addresses solved the issue.

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