Universal Media Server | Forum

I have a video file (mkv) with external subtitles (srt) in same directory and same name. However UMS keeps serving the file with the embedded subtitles ignoring the external ones (testing with vlc as client). I tried with renaming subtitles files to ".forced.srt" but that did not help either. This works with serviio but is annyoing honestly hence I was looking for an alternative but subtitles seem to be the huge Achilles heel of media servers. My old media player allowed me to play from shared folders and would always serve all available subtitles (embedded or external) and more than 1 language. eg. "it just worked".

How can I get that "it just works" with UMS? why can't it just serve all available subs and I choose on my client?

It's very likely that your configuration is wrong. You need to tell UMS what subtitles you prefer that it uses, and the configuration isn't very intuitive. There is an attempt at an explanation in the GitHub Wiki. But, as long as you don't post debug files, nobody can really know what the problem is.