[FEATURE REQUEST] Do you want to edit the Audio Track and Subtitle Tracks Labels? (VOTING POLL)

General Discussions
1

This is a voting poll for a feature request that several Plex Media Server users have expressed interest in. I’m framing this description in an Agile development method, so that users and developers alike can easily follow this.

As a [Plex Media Server administrator]

I want [to edit the labels of the Audio Tracks and Subtitle Tracks of a Movie or TV Show]

So that [I can identify the difference between tracks of same language which were created for different purposes, such as Visually Impaired Audio, and Director’s Comments, and Forced Subtitles]

AUDIO TRACK EXAMPLE:
Currently, the Audio Track selection appears like this:
English (DTS 5.1)
English (AC3 5.1)
English (AC3 Stereo)

but I want it to look like this:
English (Theatrical)
English (Director’s Comments)
English (Visually Impaired)

SUBTITLE TRACK EXAMPLE:
Currently, the Subtitle Track selection appears like this:
English (PGS)
English (PGS)
English (PGS)

but I want it to look like this:
English (Normal)
English (Forced Subtitles)
English (Director’s Comments)

THE ISSUE:
The issue is that Plex Media Server uses it’s own labeling convention for Audio Tracks and Subtitle Tracks, which is not descriptive enough. The user can only guess which Audio Track or Subtitle is appropriate.

SOME HELPFUL DETAILS:
This would be especially useful with MKV file/containers.
I am able to easily edit the Name Attribute in MakeMKV(expert mode) and MKVToolNix(post-remuxing), but Plex Media Server does not recognize those attributes.

Other posts referencing this same feature/issue:
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/94655/forced-subtitle-labeling




https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/138870/best-practices-for-file-naming-of-srt-files

Sincerely,
-michael

9 Likes
2

Adding to that:

PMS should use the file’s default track names.
PMS should use the file’s default tracks.

I mux my MKV files 1by1 and check which audio track should be the default one and which subtitle track should be the default one (if needed). Playing a completely muxed MKV file then in … let’s say VLC player, all my flags that I set on the subtitle and audio tracks are used correctly. PMS uses it’s own scheme for selecting tracks and showing their information. Which is fine. But we need an option to disable Plex’s way and just use the file’s own information for that.

3

We don’t need to edit the track titles. The titles are already there in the files.
What we need is Plex displaying the track titles in the client’s user interfaces.

And this is already an existing feature request.

4

@OttoKerner said:
We don’t need to edit the track titles. The titles are already there in the files.
What we need is Plex displaying the track titles in the client’s user interfaces.

And this is already an existing feature request.

@SANchiPINchi said:
Adding to that:

PMS should use the file’s default track names.
PMS should use the file’s default tracks.

I mux my MKV files 1by1 and check which audio track should be the default one and which subtitle track should be the default one (if needed). Playing a completely muxed MKV file then in … let’s say VLC player, all my flags that I set on the subtitle and audio tracks are used correctly. PMS uses it’s own scheme for selecting tracks and showing their information. Which is fine. But we need an option to disable Plex’s way and just use the file’s own information for that.

Both of you make excellent points!
@OttoKerner - can you post a link here to that existing feature request?

I would be satisfied with PMS displaying the the track titles that are labeled in an MKV file, as @OttoKerner stated; however some users might still want to edit the track names in PMS, if they are not adept at editing metadata for different file types.

Still, just having PMS display the track names would be a huge improvement.

Thanks for your comments guys and helping to keep this issue active.

5

@michaelkruger said:
@OttoKerner - can you post a link here to that existing feature request?

I can’t, since this is in an Plex Pass-only subforum.

6

This is so necessary. =D>

We native English speakers are so often forgotten in the world of subtitles.

It makes sense that all the subtitle experts and authors of standards etc are non-native English speakers, and these guys always want subtitles end-to-end for the whole production.

In that use-case, alien speech is treated no differently, subtitles show everything as the local language and there is no gap. So it’s easy to imagine that none of the subtitle experts care about native English speakers, because there’s no use-case they can relate to.

90% of my subtitles are in external srt. It would be wonderful if plex could recognise en.forced.srt filename format so at least I can have a little bit of control over my experience.

This is hard to achieve manually. Take the film Lucy for example. There are parts where the director wants the audience to experience that Lucy can’t understand Korean, so on the blu-ray for Korean speech there are parts that are not subtitled. Later, subtitles are shown.
Switching on and off full English subtitles results in an experience that’s not as the director intended, which for me spoils the movie experience.

7

@abssorb said:
90% of my subtitles are in external srt. It would be wonderful if plex could recognise en.forced.srt filename format so at least I can have a little bit of control over my experience.

This is already possible. The ‘forced’ subtitle tracks are marked ‘forced’ in the user interfaces, so the end user can recognise them.
But this is not the topic of this feature request.

8

Without this feature yet being available, I keep all my subtitles in .srt format. I named them .en.sdh.srt for English subtitles for the death and hearing impaired, en.forced.srt for forced subtitles and en.srt for regular ones. Would be great if the file naming could be configured to fit this syntax…

9

Really hard to tell which of my English subtitles are full discussions and things like signs and visual subs since the Titles of the subtitles are not displayed. We really need this.

10

We absolutely need to be able to label subtitles. I have hearing impaired subtitles for my Grandmother, but she cannot figure out which subtitle is which, since they all simply say “English”.

11

@abssorb said:
This is so necessary. =D>

We native English speakers are so often forgotten in the world of subtitles.

It’s not only about native speakers. Even for me (german) it’s hard to “organize” different subtitles.

@ianhouser said:
We absolutely need to be able to label subtitles. I have hearing impaired subtitles for my Grandmother, but she cannot figure out which subtitle is which, since they all simply say “English”.

Myself i only need forced subtitles normally, but i have several hearing impaired friends. And it’s always hard to find out, wich subtitle ist the right one.
I often have these subtitles:

  • english forced
  • english complete and / or english fot hte hearing impaired
  • german forced
  • german complete and / or german for the heraring compaired
  • other language(s) forced
  • other language(s) for the hearing impaired

Even tho i normally don’t use Directors Comments or such, i see that if there is a solution for the naming for “hearing impaired” it could be a solution for “any naming” as well.

I think a
MOVIE-NAME (YEAR).LOCAL.TYPE.srt (or any other ext)
or
MOVIE-NAME (YEAR).LOCAL.TYPE.DESCRIPTION.srt would be a possibility, where

DESCRIPTION = “free text” and TYPE = keywords for “directors comments, hearing impaired, whatever”

or just

TYPE = a mix of both, where it could be free text, if a keyword isnt detected.

This would make a real great program even better :wink:

12

Definitely needed.

13

@Aileron79 said:
Without this feature yet being available, I keep all my subtitles in .srt format. I named them .en.sdh.srt for English subtitles for the death and hearing impaired, en.forced.srt for forced subtitles and en.srt for regular ones. Would be great if the file naming could be configured to fit this syntax…

This is what I would like to see as well.
Surprises it hasn’t been implemented by now1

14

i just want to be able to get the director’s voice shut off so i can watch my movies that play the director’s voice without hearing him or her.

15

Can’t believe this is still not done.

16

why are there 2 NO votes in the poll? Seriously?

17

Just adding the “name” field to what’s normally there would be excellent. I hate guessing what’s what when selecting. Can’t believe how old this thread is, with how many “yes” votes, and still nothing from Plex …

18

@pmullady said:
why are there 2 NO votes in the poll? Seriously?

Those are the 2 guys that know Feature Requests are a complete waste of time as are Polls.
Plex does what Plex wants.
Plex don’t want to waste time developing the editing of audio and sub tracks.
It’ll never happen.

Plex is deep into developing things users DON’T WANT.
There’s no time for anything else.

19

Another Yes vote. Just to drive home the point, yesterday I was watching a movie I’d accidentally converted without setting up the forced track correctly – if Plex would just display the name of the track (from the MKV header), I would have been able to pick the right one the first time. As it stands, I had to wait for the transcoder to dump the no-subtitle stream, spin up and process the first (wrong) track, try the next one, spin up and process that, etc. Took about a minute in all, just to find the right one. This shouldn’t be very hard to implement…

ETA: even less work than I thought, apparently the title attribute is already being parsed and stored in the item metadata, see the Get Info dialog on the web interface. It’s just a tiny UI / data adapter tweak to change from language - codec to title - language - codec (granted, probably on a dozen different clients…)

20

Yep, also plex should have an option to assume unknown/undefined audio is not a foreign lang, which is the case probably 99% of the time. Becuase there is no way to only allow/auto enable forced subtitles without also dealing with subtitles being enabled just becuase the audio lang. wasn’t defined.