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Does Plex support VTT subtitles?
Hi,
I have just made an experiment with a self made mkv. It was created using mkvtoolnix-gui. For testing I have added the following subtitles:
Text #1 ID : 4 Format : UTF-8 Codec ID : S_TEXT/UTF8 Codec ID/Info : UTF-8 Plain Text Duration : 45 min 17 s Bit rate : 297 b/s Count of elements : 2289 Stream size : 98.8 KiB (0%) Language : English Default : Yes Forced : No Text #2 ID : 5 Format : S_TEXT/WEBVTT Codec ID : S_TEXT/WEBVTT Duration : 45 min 17 s Bit rate : 829 b/s Count of elements : 2365 Stream size : 275 KiB (0%) Language : English Default : No Forced : No
What surprised me that while mediainfo seemingly recognizes the second VTT subtitle format, if I add the media file to Plex, the SRT gets correctly recognized though the VTT version is displayed as None. In the XML I can see that the codec is indeed none. So it doesn't seem to be recognized. And of course it crashes my web player completely.
Is there anything I can do about this? I have a powerful enough server to transcode and burn in those subs if needed. I just want Plex to support VTT.
Thanks
Interesting that they list vtt as supported there. It doesn't work for me at all.
After 3 years still the same. Plex crashes with embeded VTT (S_TEXT/WEBVTT) subtitles and I am:
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extracting .vtt from .mkv using mkvextract
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changing them to .srt using ffmpeg
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creating new .mkv with original audio, video and new .srt subtitles using MKVToolNix
Very convenient to do it for multiple seasons of TV shows :)
And yes, ffmpeg can not extract the .vtt and is obviously the reason why plex is not being able to handle them.
Here's what I would do:
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Download SubtitleEdit 3.6.3 (or whatever the latest version is) and make it the default app when you click on a subtitle file such as an srt file.
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Click on your subtitle file and the interface will open.
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The format in the pulldown menu at the top should read WebVTT(.vtt). Curious enough, the actual file type may read .srt but actually it's a .vtt file in disguise (lol I guess).
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Click on that format pulldown and go to the very top and select SubRip (.srt) and leave the encoding the same, probably UTF-8 without BOM (lol whatever that means).
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Then click save and it will create a different subtitle file.
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Delete the old .srt (vtt) file.
Now it should be working with Plex.
The issue described here is about VTT subtitles embedded in MKVs not working properly.
I noticed this the other day as well. I use the video pop out in Firefox quite a bit and it has always bothered me that subtitles don't work with it. I had popped out video from something other than Plex and the subtitles worked great. Did some research and realized Firefox says it only supports VTT, which I had never heard of - I've always used SRT. It was easy enough to convert an SRT to VTT with SubtitleEdit but I had the same experience. Wouldn't play at all with the VTT subtitles after embedding them in the MKV. Worked just fine if I just had the VTT in the folder with the same name as the MKV. As others have mentioned, what I could was that it's something FFMpeg needs to support; doesn't seem like there's anything Plex needs to fix.
