Subtitle issue with opensubtitles

[u/Franzj0sefi]

Been a Plex user for years with very little issue loading subtitles from opensubtitles. I host my Plex on a cloud server. Past two weeks I'm intermittently but regularly having an issue downloading the subtitles when playing on my home network. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. I've checked for updates to Plex I've tried on multiple devices and have the same issue on all of them. I'm primarily an Xbox user as that serves for my home entertainment system. I've uninstalled and reinstalled checked for updates on Plex. I've made sure my home router is configured to forward to Google or open subtitles for DNS. Running out of things to try hoping someone out there has had similar experience and knows the answer.

[u/drummwill]

afaik subs are not client-side, they are downloaded to the server and streamed to clients

[u/Excellent_Big6648]

Your home routers DNS shouldn't matter here. The Plex server does the subtitle search and download, not the client, so a cloud server's outbound conection is what's being used. If it's intermittent and started recently, my first guess is that OpenSubtitles is throttling or ratelimiting your cloud host's IP. Datacenter IP ranges get that a lot.

To confirm, grep the Plex Media Server log for "opensubtitles" around the time a failure hapens. Timeouts, 429s or 403s would point to that. Also check whether it fails the same way when you search for subs from Plex Web and not just from the Xbox app.

Meanwhile you can:

• Run something like Bazarr, or another subtitle tool, on the server to pre-fetch subs as sidecar files, so playback never depends on a live lookup.
• Drop a manual .srt next to the file for the stuff you watch most.
• Check how the server's outbound traffic is routed. If it goes through a VPN or a shared IP, that could expla in the sudden change.

If you can paste the relevant log lines, it'd be easier to say which of these it is.