Changing Title of Audio Tracks and Subtitle Tracks

Feature Suggestions
1

Hi there everyone.

I have seen this topic come up multiple times in the past but never been seen through so I thought it would be a good idea to bump this request again.

I believe it is a very good idea to be able to give titles to each of the audio tracks for a video file, given that us users are obviously enthusiasts with films that have multiple audio tracks, commentaries, and other such tracks.

Also, being able to differentiate between tracks without starting the film already or checking which one it correlates to on the DVD/Blu-ray (Which defeats the purpose of having a Plex Server, watching movies off Physical Media) would be very helpful.

An example I’ve already given in which this would be a good thing is being able to label commentary tracks, which multiple films have multiple versions be it with the actors, directors, etc.

An example of giving subtitle tracks custom names would be if say a film had subtitles for only certain parts of the film/TV Show (Baby Driver Sign Language subtitles, Anime putting English Text around Japanese Text to allow you to read what a sign/messages say).

It’s also annoying that these subtitles would be default selected on a BR Player, but are turned off by default (In which case you have to know they’re missing, stop the film, figure out which subtitle track it is, and resume), and you may never notice unless you have already watched the film on disc or in theatres already.

I would very much appreciate these features be added as it would only be something that the hardcore would want to mess with (seeming everyone) and it would allow the admins of the servers to make it that the less knowledgeable users (parents, kids, etc.) be able to know which subtitles to use if they want them.

Side note: For Media that is originally in a different language, can we just have the audio track default to the Disc’s default track? My Father wanted to watch Yojimbo/Sanjuro/Seven Samurai on his phone on a flight but when he synced it, he downloaded the English audio track which is a commentary by historians talking about the film and not the actual dialogue. If it just downloaded the Original Default Audio Track and Subtitles with Foreign Audio, it would have been fine but Plex forces you to watch films with your preferred language rather than it’s original audio track. Very situational I know, but still an annoyance for someone trying to convince him to ditch Netflix and let me buy BluRays for the Plex Server.

2

You mean like this?
grafik

You can do that with MKVtoolnixGUI

This type of subtitles is commonly called “forced subs” or “subs for foreign parts”.
Plex has alreay support for them and calls them “forced” in its UI.

grafik

Again, set the “forced” flag on this track using MKVtoolnixGUI

3

For labels I meant actually saying things like “Director’s Commentary” or “Alternate Dub” or things like that instead of just “English (blah)”

I unfortunately have never seen on any of my sub files in Plex or the Languages Settings the term “Forced”.

This may be because I’m using Windows as a Server instead of Linux but unfortunately there is no option to enable Forced subtitles by default.

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Capture

It’s also annoying that I would have to now re-mux all of my files with MKVtoolnixGUI instead of Plex recognizing them automatically when VLC can with the same file.

4

Please look at the lowest item. It says “commentary” as title. Of course the regular audio tracks of this movie don’t have titles, because they would be highly redundant.

5

In my experience, after ripping a DVD or Bluray, none of the subtitle streams is usually tagged.
Of course this is highly dependant on the software you are using to rip the discs. Some of them don’t even rip the forced streams without you explicitly telling them to do so.
I made it a habit to check every ripped file in MKVtoolnix and add the titles and the “forced” flag if applicable.

The Plex subtitle mode “Shown with foreign audio” is dependent on the “forced” flag. If none of the subtitle tracks in your file has it set, Plex cannot know to enable the right subtitle.

MKVtoolnix has a “header editor” which can add titles and the forced flag without the need to remux the whole file.

6

In order to wrap this up…
As Otto pointed out… what you’re asking for can partly already be done.

There’s 2 existing feature suggestions which are already covering/addressing the gaps mentioned in your posts:

Display track names in all clients

Many clients already support this; this feature has however not yet found its way to all of them…

Editing the track language (and names) from within Plex

I suggest you comment/vote in those existing threads in order to avoid distracting/dispersing votes and attention. In particular the 1st thread has been quite popular – the 2nd one is still searching for some attention :wink:

Unless I’ve completely missed something in this thread that’s not covered in the 2, I’ll close this one as a duplicate.

7

What I was more suggesting was having these features built into Plex instead of having to use a 3rd party app. It would be much easier to start watching something on plex and knowing exactly which track you have selected and then going back and changing it accordingly

8

2nd suggestion linked in my post above.

9

2021 clean-up: duplicate