I’m working on encoding all my movies to an .mkv container with subtitles and other goodies all in the same container with it. Seems like a really great way to have my files organized for plex.
The problem is that I probably got a bit far into this project before thinking about forced subtitles. There very well could be movies that I’ve missed where I didn’t include a forced subtitle track for foreign/alien languages being spoken.
For Plex, I feel it best to have a forced subtitle track be default, but be able to select another subtitle track that has all subtitles if need be. I hate the idea of burning in subtitles.
Anyway, long story short, is there a database anywhere that will tell me if a particular movie has a foreign and/or an alien language in it somewhere such that I would want to get my forced subtitles working on that movie?
(I just figured this out with “Captain Phillips.” Lot’s of foreign language in that movie.)
(And for what it’s worth, I’m an English speaker only.)
if all you want is to identify if a movie has multiple spoken languages you could check out IMDb. Right on their title main page there’s a “language” section listing all the (supposedly) spoken languages in this movie (looking at it from the original version.
However… this does not give an exact match if actually all foreign audio is subtitled (for this particular movie I remember the German/French sections being subtitled… I might be horribly wrong but I believe there were no extensive subtitled Italian sections).
PS: I’m not aware of an actual database listing specific forced subtitles for individual disc/digital releases
Sweet, that’s certainly a good start. That seems to be a great spot for foreign languages at least. I did take a look at Star Wars though, and sadly it says that English is the only spoken language on IMDB, when I know for a fact that there are Alien languages in that one.
Anyway, I do think IMDB will probably get me through 90% of my collection just fine. Thanks for pointing that detail out to me!
I do wonder though…there are certainly some movies that the character speaks a foreign language that isn’t meant to be subtitled, as the viewer isn’t supposed to know what they are saying. I wonder if IMDB will still keep that language as a spoken language though.
