I just spent a good 20 hours researching forums and playing with metadata tags only to land at a very sub-par solution. I understand this feature already exists for TV libraries but not Movie libraries.
The User Story: I am a server admin. I have an old movie (e.g. The Seventh Seal) that has one original audio track in Swedish (Mono)(stream#1), and one Commentary track in English (Stereo)(stream#2). No matter what I do in Plex settings or metadata tags, Plex will select the second track by default for all of my users. (which is obviously not the desired experience.
My best assessment of the cause: Plex tries to select the track in the language that the server admin set in settings > languages. If none is found or if that setting is turned off, Plex will select the track with the most channels (or at least not Mono). If all the tracks have the same number of channels, it will pick the first stream, which is what many other users have leveraged to work around.
My hack: I had to tag the original audio “eng” for English, and the commentary track “und” for Undetermined, and check the “Automatically select audio and subtitle tracks” checkmark in settings and set it to English.
Shortfalls of my hack: The feature that turns on subtitles by default for foreign languages won’t work because the audio is labeled English now. Not to mention that a Swedish audio track is now labeled English which can be confusing to users even if I put clarification in the extended title of the track.
The Ask: Put a dropdown in the advanced section of the edit window for a given movie that says “default audio track:” and list the available audio tracks for that file.
This has been such a pain in my neck and would be such an incredible benefit for very little effort comparatively. Please vote for this!
Although for your particular case, you rather want something like:
Distinguish between regular audio tracks and “commentary” audio tracks. When performing auto-selection of tracks, never consider the commentary tracks.
Current versions of Plex server do already read this flag from MKV files (although I’m not aware that it is already used in its auto-selection logic).
thats true. and the commentary flag would be a good one for plex to take into account. here is another one that i found too that i actually like better:
I think theres a big need for some admin control over default audio track but its hard to corroborate one feature request because theres so many ways to solve the problem. maybe something for plex to look into
I would like to be able to choose a different audio track for a specific movie, regardless of the user’s default language settings. For example, if I have The Passion of the Christ (2004) in my library and the video has 3 audio tracks: 1. Aramaic, 2. Spanish, 3. English — I want Plex to play track 1 (Aramaic) by default for this movie, even if the user’s default language is Spanish for all other content.
The User Story: I am a server admin. I have an old movie (e.g. The Seventh Seal) that has one original audio track in Swedish (Mono)(stream#1), and one Commentary track in English (Stereo)(stream#2). No matter what I do in Plex settings or metadata tags, Plex will select the second track by default for all of my users. (which is obviously not the desired experience.
My best assessment of the cause: Plex tries to select the track in the language that the server admin set in settings > languages. If none is found or if that setting is turned off, Plex will select the track with the most channels (or at least not Mono). If all the tracks have the same number of channels, it will pick the first stream, which is what many other users have leveraged to work around.
My hack: I had to tag the original audio “eng” for English, and the commentary track “und” for Undetermined, and check the “Automatically select audio and subtitle tracks” checkmark in settings and set it to English.
Shortfalls of my hack: The feature that turns on subtitles by default for foreign languages won’t work because the audio is labeled English now. Not to mention that a Swedish audio track is now labeled English which can be confusing to users even if I put clarification in the extended title of the track.
The Ask: Put a dropdown in the advanced section of the edit window for a given movie that says “default audio track:” and list the available audio tracks for that file.
