I have been trying to find a way to filter my movies by their country of origin that doesn’t require manually overriding the country tag. It appears that the existing tag is being set to all countries with a release, which I don’t think really helps anyone. That being said, I’m sure people with smaller libraries have just been editing the list to suit their needs.
To be more precise, I’m requesting that either a new “country of origin” field is added for proper filtering or that the existing field be mapped to country of origin instead of production countries/releases as it is today.
How do you define the country of origin of a movie?
And which metadata source has this information available, if it is different from the production country?
I spent some time looking at the APIs for TMDB and IMDB and then compared results with what is set up in Plex. I think the actual issue is how inconsistent the data is. For example, the country of origin and original language for The Fifth Element is France and French respectively. The only logic I can come up with there is that it premiered at Cannes. Another one is The Bourne Supremacy which has 4-5 countries of origin; perhaps because of the number of film locations.
I was hoping for a consistent way to create smart collections for specific countries; e.g. French Cinema, Japanese Cinema, etc. It looks like no matter the data source, that won’t be feasible without manually editing the data in Plex. Sorry for the trouble, I had assumed I knew what was going on after looking at a couple films and misunderstood.
In this particular case it can be argued that it is a film coming out of France. French director, French producer. But largely shot in the UK.
Though I very much doubt that French was used during the production, given the majority of the cast.
There is a lot of nonsense in the databases, simply because people are ignorant of the world. They assume that because a movie comes with English audio, it must be coming out of Hollywood.
I do this very reliably on my server by using the “audio language” filter. Do note that this is based on metadata in the file and as such you need to have clean and well “tagged” files for this to work. A program like tinymediamanager can help with this by filtering movies with “unknown” audio tracks so you can fix them.
Interestingly, it also works for TV shows, although Plex has a bug in which it cannot generate a poster automatically if you do this. However just put a custom poster there instead and this problem is solved.
I do this for collections like “foreign movies” (any language track except my native language and English) or like “Swedish movies” (audio language Swedish) etc etc
If you have animated movies with multiple audio tracks, just add “genre is not animated”.
The language of the audio track is no indication about the origin country. There are dubs.
See the above example, where a movie is produced in English, but done so in France.
You’re German right? I know your country has lots of dubbed content so maybe this is a weird idea for you, however in my country (Sweden) dubs only really exist for kids movies and animated movies. All my filters as such has “genre is not animated/family/children” which works very well.
About your other point, I disagree personally. If a movie is spoken in french, I see it as a French movie. I see the Fifth element as an English movie. So this works for me at least
Even in Germany there are nowadays many titles produced in English. Simply because they are staffed with international personnel and cast. And also to cater for an international market.
Can it be said then that they are English movies and series? Nope. The country of orgin is still Germany.
And this is what this request is dealing with: the Country of origin, not the audio language.
You’re right and I apologize for my suggestion. I’ll make sure to shut up now and crawl back to read-only mode in this lovely forum that I’ve gotten used to👌
Yeah, a great example would be Vampire Hunter D. Both films are Japanese, but the author of the Manga wanted the main character to be English speaking so after the success of the first film, the second one was done with native English voice actors. Still a Japanese film IMO.
I appreciate all the feedback. Using spoken language is a different way to think about it, but I think I would use multiple filters in that case. I prefer original language personally, so it would depend alot on country of origin.
