I don’t necessarily need the ‘sync’ feature, but it’d be nice to have audio files be detected as subtitle files are.
My use case: Avoiding a transcode when streaming lossless Bluray rips to plex in the browser. BD video can usually be direct streamed, but the very common 5.1/7.1 AC3 audio can’t. To solve this, I downmix to stereo AAC. It would be nice to have this external audio track be recognized as an “Optimized Version” of the audio- I’d save a lot of space by not having another copy of the same video sitting around.
I feel this feature request is within the spirit of plex; between “optimized versions” and the real time transcoder, it seems to me that plex is intended as a system which interprets your media as is. An archive of lossless media should remain untouched, and all alterations should be made externally, either on demand or in an optimized version. Plex’s on demand transcoder takes care of this; what we want is the ability to have ‘optimized versions’ to be as flexible as the transcoder. Remuxing the original file is working in reverse, and I do not believe it is in the spirit of this system to require that.
In my use case, the stereo AAC track is explicitly a ‘plex version’ of the audio track- it was made for use with the contemporary limitations of plex clients and browsers. As browsers and plex clients evolve, these limitations are subject to change, and as such anything built with these limitations in mind do not belong in a media archive.
In short, what I am asking for is a more modular approach to plex’s “optimized versions”, where alternate audio tracks are presented as a ‘version’ of the movie/show. As I understand it, plex clients will prioritize versions which they can direct stream; the ‘version’ approach will ‘just work’ whereas selectable audio streams would not.
It just occured to me; my proposition is basically to make plex’s optimization operate in a similar manner to youtube’s DASH.
