Plex : Settings : Languages : Prefer Audio Tracks In :
Does selecting “None” at the bottom of the preferred audio languages
signify preferring “No audio track (mute)” or “No preferred language”?
If the former, it appears that, currently,
I must select a preferred audio language if
I want to select a preferred subtitle language.
Is there any way to prefer a subtitles language without
altering the default language of a video file?
In other words:
If my native language is English, I’d like Plex to
automatically attempt to activate English subtitles whenever
a movie is NOT in English,
without altering the default audio language in any way.
Is this possible?
How can Plex know whether a movie is “not in english”?
It can only look at the ‘language’ tag of the audio track(s).
If it doesn’t find an audio track which is tagged with the language you can understand, it knows it has a movie which is “not in english”.
And you are telling Plex which audio language you can understand by selecting a preferred audio language.
Without defining a preferred audio language, Plex can only either always activate subtitles or not at all.
It has no other criterion to decide whether you’ll actually need the subtitles or not.
You must select a preferred audio language if you want Plex to intelligently decide whether to activate subtitles or not.
But I want more control of the behavior over
the resulting action(s) that Plex takes
when working with a video file whose default audio file is
not in my preferred language.
( I am assuming that there is typically a default audio file designator included when a video file is embedded with multiple audio files, no? )
Sloppy Example
if [audio.lang.default != lang.preferred]
then {
if exist subtitle.lang.preferred then enable subtitle.lang.preferred and audio.lang.default
else if exist audio.lang.preferred then enable audio.lang.preferred # [optional]
else enable audio.lang.default
}
You get the idea.
So, I don’t want Plex to automatically try to
subvert videos from their native language to
dubs in another language (even my native language)
and then enable subtitles in the language I’m already hearing.
But I don’t see any options to designate whether
Plex tries to switch to preferred audio or preferred subtitles or both,
(or one only after trying the other first, as seen in my rough example).
I only see preferred audio language and preferred subtitle language.
Plex doesn’t heed the default flag at all.
If you prefer to watch original audio with subtitles (like many Anime fans do),
and the video file also has an additional audio stream in your native language
Plex has unfortunately no support for that scenario.
Plex has no concept of what a movie’s “original” language is.
I also haven’t seen a sensible way to signal the original language with the currently available meta tags.
I figured that if VLC knew to play say, Amelie in French,
that there must be some metadata within the raw file defaulting to that,
before Plex ever starts looking into it.
