Hi all
I noticed (and was notified by my users) recently that Plex players (Apple TV, Web, etc. several clients) play non-english audio tracks by default, despite english being the selected playback language on my server as well as all these players.
Is this a recent bug?
Friend showed me on his appleTV, playing content from me played a french track. Not english.
Then another friend showed me other content (totally unrelated content) from me defaulting to Russian every episode.
English is selected as the default language on both these friends players (I confirmed it) and on my server, and this seems like a new/recent anomaly as folks are communicative with me and have never reported this before.
Is this a bug? is there a fix? if it isn’t a bug what would cause this?
Plex disregards “default” flags in files, from what I understand, so why would it play anything other than English audio by default when it’s available?
Have you verified that the track is actually English in your source file?
Does not seem likely across multiple files, but there is always a possibility that the tracks are incorrectly marked. That would be the first thing I would check. Additionally, do your files actually have multiple languages?
Some other questions, when you say “English is selected as the default language on both these friends players (I confirmed it) and on my server…”, what exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean that your friends selected the English track on their end?
I am not sure if you are aware or not but there is an option from your account level to set the preferences for the audio and subtitle track auto selection. I think it can be set from a couple different apps, but I found it easiest to use the web app. You click the wrench icon, then on the left click the “Account” under your username. On that page, scroll down in the right side to the “Settings” section and you’ll want to set these parameters.
The “searches” setting is only relevant if the admin for the sever allows searching for subtitles (I believe that can be disabled by the admin which is why I say that, but ultimately my point is that setting is not relevant for this issue).
Whether or not those are set would determine the tracks that actually get selected.
However, I feel like some more info that I asked about above is required to better help. To my understanding, there should be no reason for Plex to select a different language track once the track you want is selected.
Very strange questions but I’ll address them below:
“are my audio tracks improperly labelled”
…no. the audio tracks are identical to their respective labels. English is English. French is French etc. Bizarre question..
“When I say English is selected as the default language what do I mean by that”
I mean that English is selected as the default language. immediately after asking that question, you referenced an area of the settings where language preferences are set. that’s what I’m referring to. that section of the settings. Here’s mine:
And on client players similarly English is set. My various friends appletv boxes, shield, plex web player..
English.
Anyway. Perhaps someone from Plex can address this question I posted? I paid quite a bit of money for this software. Not super interested in entertaining these weird “can you repeat exactly what you said in your post” type questions from the layman “community”.
Plex staff?
Little bit of customer support please? (I’m the customer, to clarify. I paid for this product called Plex.)
This is how support tends to work with Plex. Other forum users help out and Plex staff will also answer (sometimes they miss threads, sometimes threads do unfortunately go unanswered).
If you are not going to be appreciative of someone trying to help, then good luck with your issue.
You had me repeat exactly what I said in my submission. Not sure what exactly you were doing with that lengthy response when it had nothing at all of substance.
I’m a customer posting in a support forum for a paid product.
I don’t think you should be offended by me when I’m not appreciative of your response which was a request for repetition. I also don’t think it’s an appropriate use of your time to make such posts in this forum when you yourself are a customer.
Based on questions asked in this forum and your original input, shark2k response and follow-up questions seem perfectly valid to me.
Especially because they helped clarify some vague aspects of your original request for help. Specifically, there’s no server/client audio preferences… just those on your account (and the account preferences of the users with whom you’re sharing your media). The automatic audio selection will be overridden if users manually set a different language for a specific show/movie.
There’s also lots of cases where users get their media from strange sources and it’s tracks are either not or incorrectly tagged.
If you/your friends have experienced this fairly recently, you could take a look at your server logs (or post them here for somebody else to take a look). The interesting sections should be prefixed by an MDE: label. Those indicate the playback requests addressed to your server and how it decided what audio/subtitle tracks to show (and if this is done by transcoding the media or not). Edit: otherwise, please make sure you have debug logging enabled, then reproduce the issue.
PS: I’ve closed your duplicate post as that’ll just invite the exact same clarifications.
