Commentaries tracks as "extras"

Feature Suggestions
1

The TLDR:

The “I’ve got time to burn”:

As I’ve added more and more media to my library over time, I’ve learned more and more about what is possible in different file-types, encodings and so on, and it always stings a smidge when I see something that would be fairly useful that isn’t implemented. Really, that applies to a lot of different software (why oh why does no one support animated heics or PNGs?) but I dunno, for some reason I really feel it with my media libraries.

Anyway, the one I’m bothered to ask about today is Commentaries on Movies and TV Shows.

They are essentially a type of Extra, getting to listen to the directors, actors, writers, crew etc talk about their time making these creative experiences we all enjoy. You get to hear tidbits about how they did an effect or stunt, banter between these people who have worked together for weeks, months, even years on these projects, and it adds a great deal of replayability to almost anything it is added to.
And almost everything has them. Buy a TV season, you’re likely to have access to at least one episode with directors and actors discussing why this episode was so standout. Buy a movie, you’ll get at least a directors commentary, but often different groups of cast or crew as well.

When preparing our media to add to our libraries, many of us will dig in a bit and add whatever useful information we can to the media, setting track languages, tagging the “Foreign Audio” track, maybe even filling out the metadata to display to be within the file. And naming the audio tracks is a pretty normal part of that. This one is Atmos, this one is is the Audio Descriptions, and so on.

And while the Commentaries are sorted just the same, they are often tucked away out of sight in Plex, needing you to start a movie or episode, and then bring down the Info Pane, switch to Playback Options and then scroll through the audio streams to select the commentary you want.

My suggestion is basically to surface these commentaries a little more. It doesn’t have to be in a super complex, detailed manor. I was thinking that if there is a Audio Track in a media file that contains the word “Commentary”, it could be shown in two basic ways:

  • Add a entry amongst the other Extras when viewing the media info, just called the name of the detected track. Selecting it starts the main media item, but with the Commentary track as the selected audio track from the beginning
  • In the Info Pane that can be brought down during playback, it could be just like the above, but below the display of Chapters. Selecting it just switches which audio track is playing

Of course, an item should be listed per track with “Commentary” in title, and when a Commentary track is playing, then if the “Info Pane” had that section as described, then the selection item for the currently playing track could just have the option to “Play Main Feature” to switch back to the default audio stream.

I wish I was artsier so I could mock up something to show what I mean. Maybe I’ll give it a go and if it’s not an embarrassing scribe, I’ll update this.

So in theory just need to add a bit of string parsing, and a small extra UI element. I’ve tried to think about this from the perspective of needing to add as little as possible to the codebase to make it work, but of course this would require an update to both Server and all the players to support it.
If not changing anything in the “Info Pane”, then it could theoretically be done purely on the server though, as it just lists an additional “Extra” and the players that already support Extras should just accept it as if it was a separate file, like a trailer or behind the scenes entry.

Well, thanks for coming to my TED talk, here’s hoping the idea resonates, or at least stirs some thinking with someone else to come up with a better idea around this

2

So… in short:
You want an option to present audio tracks with the word „commentary“ in their title as separate „extra“ item for that movie. Clicking on the item should play the video with that audio track selected. The on-screen-menu during playback should reflect (a) available commentary tracks while playing a regular audio track and (b) an option to return to the regular audio track

Did I understand that correctly?

2 Likes
3

I think this is very desirable for people who take the time to include commentary and other supplemental tracks.
But it must be kept in mind that one video can also have

  • several different commentaries in the same language
  • commentaries in different languages (yes, the number of server admins is on the rise who need to care for content in more than one language)
  • commentaries can be not just audio tracks but also subtitle tracks
  • sometimes a combination of selecting the right audio and subtitle track is required for the intended experience
1 Like
4

Yes, yes that is right on it. Wish I could be as succinct :blush:

5

Hmmm, I usually name mine based on what the box or menus say, like “Director’s Commentary” or “Commentary with Actor 1 & Actor 2”, stuff like that. I suppose most people would just write Commentary…

I mean, in that case just treating them like when there are multiple deleted scenes? Just sequential listings?

I was thinking about this in with limits to keep it simple to implement in my mind, which is why I didn’t really think about subtitles… I suppose one solution would be to have subtitle tracks with matched names, but that doesn’t help for multiple language translations…

It’s a pity that MKVs don’t have a way to link subtitles to specific audio tracks…

6

Not sure what you mean here. You can’t play several audio tracks at once. Nor several subtitle tracks at once.
Playing them in succession doesn’t make sense either, as that would mean playing the whole movie twice.

7

Sorry, I mean like having one entry in the Extras section per track with “Commentary” in the title.

I was referring to how if you have multiple deleted scenes for a media item, then the scenes are listed as “Deleted Scene 1”, “Deleted Scene 2” and so on, to be able to choose which you want to see

8

I for one would even settle with a simple “Extras” badge on the audio and subtitle selectors.
Just to alert the user to the fact that there are more than the regular tracks available.

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2 Likes
9

This would be great, at t the moment there are too many clicks to get to audio and subtitles. It should really be is own button under a movie or episode.

10

So I got tagged in a similar feature request where symlinks were suggested as a way to achieve something similar, and it got me thinking about how to solve this again. Here is what I came up with, thoughts?

11

In addition to detecting tracks with “commentary” in their title, the feature should also (and ideally, primarily) detect if the Matroska “commentary” flag has been set for that track (all my commentary track have this flag set).

1 Like
12

Ideally yes, and I also have my whole library as .mkv files with flags set on everything.

It’s worth remembering that not everyone uses mkv files however. I don’t know if any other format that lets you flag the purpose of individual tracks like you can in matroska files.

So detecting the flags is something that should be there, but they would still need to find a way to do this detection on other formats…

13

I came here to request this exact feature. Please add something to the UI indicating which episodes/movies have commentary tracks and which ones do not. I think enabling the “commentary track flag” in the MKV is the best way to identify the commentary tracks; using the MKV track name containing the word “commentary” could be an alternative.

Why this is important to me:
I recently purchased DVDs for all 9 seasons of Scrubs to get the original music and the commentary tracks. Only a few episodes per season have the commentary tracks, and it’s very difficult to figure out which ones those are. It would be great if there was a way to expose commentary availability without having to remember to manually search through audio tracks.

Workaround 1 (did not work)
I tried making the commentary track the primary audio track, so it would play by default when the episode is played, so you know there is commentary available. This didn’t work because it always selects the 5.1 original broadcast track over the 2.0 commentary track. And it’s kinda annoying to have to switch if you don’t want to listen to commentary.

Workaround 2 (not very useful)
I found an open source project called PlexCommentaryCollection that runs a Python script to create a collection for all files that contain commentary tracks. It turned out to be not that useful as there were too many titles and episode continuity was lost.

Workaround 1 (kinda works)
This one is somewhat cumbersome. I created a second copy of each episode that had commentary, deleted the 5.1 original audio track, made the commentary track the default, and labeled the file name as an “interview extra” for that episode. The problem is that it’s not actually an interview; I have to remember that it’s “commentary instead”. Also, it creates an extra file for the episode that contains basically the exact same content.

1 Like
14

Researching this more, someone on Reddit, posted this as an additional workaround solution:

All my movies are already MP4’s and I already embed metadata into every single file for plex to use. So now I add “Optional Commentary” the embedded list of genres for movies. It’s searchable within plex, and it’s clearly visible from the film’s Details page. For a while I was using Edition tags, but that became a mess when I started getting actual alternate editions that had commentaries (ie Ultimate Directors Cut with Commentary).

For TV shows, I add “[Optional Commentary]” to the end of the episode title in the embedded metadata.