Foreign audio track language shown on pre-play page not in English

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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Server Version#: 1.18.0.1944
Player Version#: 4.8.4
I have many foreign films with German, Arabic, Hebrew, or Chinese, I speak none of these, just English and Spanish. For example a movie in Hebrew show a “scribble” instead of the word in English “Hebrew” as the audio language. Why?

Hebrew
Hebrew1063×471 160 KB

Can this be configured to show in English “Hebrew” instead?

Here are a few more examples: Suomi = Finnish and Svenska = Swedish, who would know?

Finnish
Finnish1046×478 511 KB

Swedish
Swedish1056×474 488 KB

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It’s showing the name in the language that it is. Take your Hebrew example above. If you did not speak English, “Hebrew” would mean nothing to you. If you can’t read the language name, how would the actual language help you?

Edit - I guess a person could understand hearing the language without being able to read it, but that doesn’t seem very common.

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Hi MovieFan.Plex,

I appreciate your response. I thought the same as the only logical reason for the design choice of the developer. BUT, in the reality it does not make sense for the following:

  • In your own example, the non-English speak could read only ONE WORD on the whole page. The full page is in English except for the word “Hebrew” which is displayed in Hebrew, his language.
  • If the Hebrew-speaking user changes the servers display language to Hebrew he will be able to understand everything throughout Plex! Ah ha, but he would not know to read “English”, “Español”, “Suomi” or “Sveska”! He would now be in MY SHOES!

For the Library owner, you or I, this is not practical. It’s commonplace to collect foreign movies to enjoy with subtitles. That is why we make such a big effort to have an elaborated subtitle system in Plex and why OpenSubtitles.com exist!

Here is another area needing the same fix. When you have to “fix a match” the drop-down for languages for the ”The Movie Database” and ”Plex Movie” show the language list in the foreign language. I had a great movie in Hindi to match because leaving the default ”English”
in the drop-down would not find a match. Do you know which of the below is Hindi?. Without selecting the right one the movie will not match.

55%20AM
55%20AM749×668 156 KB

The Movie Database shows ALL foreign languages in English, so a movie in ”Finnish” does not read ”Soumi”

Soooooo, everything in our control in the Plex server should be READABLE BY YOU AND ME in the “Display Language” we chose for the server. If there is a foreign language track, I should be able to “know” what language it is as part of my typical browsing through my collection. Typically the “server owner” is NOT going to speak/read or have people in his household that speak/read all the available languages.

The logical conclusion is the “good logic” used in the development choice is flawed and should be corrected, or even better, a library level choice be added for the display language within each library. Please promote this issue if possible to get the developers attention. I think it has long been a oversight, more than a conscious choice.

The audience needing to read and fully understand the Pre-Play page is the Server Owner and his/her users, not someone foreign to the household, thousands of miles away.

1 Like
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Good point. I’ll bring that up with the team.

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