I watch a lot of foreign content with Plex and today I got frustrated with needing to change the audio track from English to the foreign language and then change to have subtitles turned on with each episode. I just found that there are Global Audio/Subtitle settings and while they are nice there could be some improvements made.
Currently using ‘AUTO-SELECT SUBTITLE MODE’ has 3 options of ‘Manually’, ‘Shown with foreign audio’, and ‘Always enabled’. If you use the ‘Shown with foreign audio’ option, if you have your ‘PREFERRED AUDIO LANGUAGE’ set to English you will need to change audio tracks with every foreign video. If you set your ‘PREFERRED AUDIO LANGUAGE’ to the foreign language, it no longer considers that foreign language as foreign audio and so it will play the correct audio track but no subtitles. This also has the side effect of automatically playing subtitles for your original language content.
I think it would be very handy to have a few more rules available to us. I think If->Then rules would be great to add.
For example:
If audio track = ‘French’
Then play subtitles ‘English’
If audio track = ‘English’
Then play subtitles ‘None/Off’
Also having the option of multiple preferred languages would be nice. They could be in a list based off of priority and so you could add your foreign language as top priority and then your secondary language would play otherwise. At least for me, most/all of my content that has a foreign language audio choice is ideally played with that foreign language audio even if English is my preferred language normally. Potentially Plex could go a step above and have an automatic audio selection based off of original release location so that it will always play with the original audio.
This would simplify those of us that frequently watch a mixture of foreign and domestic content but can’t speak all of the languages in the content.
Having this implemented would be amazing and I hope other people have more ideas on possible rules or options.
