Director's commentary track

Feature Suggestions
1

Is there a way to include a director's commentary audio track in a movie, then choose and play it within Plex? That would be awesome.

 

Edit: While I'm thinking about it... with the extras and trailers feature now added to Plex, is there anything besides the menu that can't be included and played within Plex?

2

it would need to be included as a secondary track in the movie. just like if you had a 5.1 track and a 2.0 track in a single file but there is no way to differentiate the track as "directors commentary" because plex does not read track names. only the language tag

3

but there is no way to differentiate the track as "directors commentary" because plex does not read track names. only the language tag

Which then leads us straight to this feature vote for displaying the track names.
 
I already have got a lot of movies with multiple audio and subtitle tracks muxed in. The matroska (mkv) container allows great flexibility with this. All tracks can be given names like i.e. 'directors comment' or 'suaheli dialogue translated'. Thus including a director's comment for consumption in Plex just needs an additional audio or subtitle track muxed into the main movie file and naming that track appropriately. Often this is done as a vorbis track in mono with a bitrate of just 96k/s so the additional data volume is negligible.
 
But to use this with any plex player, it is necessary to know the name of all the embedded audio and subtitle tracks to be able to select the right one(s). As of now, all we can see are the language codes and the codec of all the audio and subtitle tracks.
 
 
 

While I'm thinking about it... with the extras and trailers feature now added to Plex, is there anything besides the menu that can't be included and played within Plex?

Some things that I don't know how to do as extras for a movie in Plex:
- hyperlinks to special websites dedicated to the movie (i.e. the promotional website from the studio or maybe some exceptional fan websites for 'cult' movies)

- - a hyperlink to the movie's IMDB entry could be realized even easier, since the IMDB ID is probably already in Plex's database
- slide shows like on many DVDs
- interactive games to be played with the remote
- playing back just the soundtrack (O.S.T.) of the movie, maybe even with selectable tracks

4

I’ll try and rip the director’s commentary as a secondary audio track. I just hope Plex can display the name of the audio track as such.

5

@aeonx said:
I’ll try and rip the director’s commentary as a secondary audio track. I just hope Plex can display the name of the audio track as such.

Ripping the Commentary track won’t do anything for you unless you then add it as an Audio Track to the original source using something like MKVToolsnix
And no Plex won’t read the track name for some dumb reason I never could understand.

6

@aeonx said:
I just hope Plex can display the name of the audio track as such.

There hasn’t changed much. My post above is still valid.
Only now at least the track ‘title’ is in the Plex database:

Here are some workarounds mentioned which work for me:

7

Early 2021 clean-up: implemented