Give Option to Play Default or First Audio Track

[Adam-Catalyst]

I have previously posted about my problems with the Language settings in PLEX here: https://forums.plex.tv/t/account-audio-subtitle-settings-how-to-get-plex-to-choose-original-audio/541808 I will attempt to outline the problem succinctly now…

There is no known setting combination in PLEX that will specify the playback of either the default, or the first audio track in a video file. Instead, it seems that when a film’s first audio track has fewer channels than subsequent audio tracks, PLEX will choose a subsequent audio track instead, even if the first audio track has been flagged as default.

This can result in the following unwanted behaviours…

• PLEX sometimes plays a commentary track instead of the audio soundtrack.

• PLEX sometimes plays audio in an unwanted language.

• PLEX sometimes plays an unwanted sound mix.

For instance, if a film’s audio track is in mono, but it includes other multi-channel audio tracks such as commentary in stereo, PLEX will play the commentary track by default, even if the audio track is the first one in the file, and flagged as default. There appears to be no way to override this behaviour. For people who watch a lot of old movies, this can happen very often. And for the less technically savvy watcher, this can be more than just an annoyance.

I have tried innumerable combinations of settings and workaround, and I have also read other people’s requests for similar features, including requests for specifying defaults for 2.0, oe 5.1, or 7.1, etc. I believe the simplest solution to a multitude of related problems that users have reported would be to add a single option to the Languages menu:

Play default or first audio track regardless of language settings.

Alternately, under the “Prefer audio tracks in” drop-down menu, an option could be added called “Default.”

In either case, the setting could play the audio track flagged as default, and if none were found, it would play the first audio track.

What do you think?

[dan0v]

I couldn’t agree more. I spend quite a bit of time setting video files to be the exact way I want, be that a specific audio track, commentary subtitle track, etc. There really should be a way for Plex to automatically choose tracks marked as DEFAULT in the video metadata, like every other video player in the world does… A specific use-case where this would be important for me is Anime and other Foreign Films. My account defaults are English audio and automatically select subtitles if playing foreign audio. This is fine, except if an Anime I am watching happens to have an English audio track, that will be picked, even if I specify the original Japanese audio, with a specific English subtitle track as DEFAULT using something like MKV-Toolnix.

Please allow us to use the defaults we set on a file by file basic, or at least give the option to select a default audio / subtitle track per show / season, rather than account-wide.

[Darkholme]

Came here looking for a way to do the same thing. The current set up is rather frustrating for Anime, where by and large, I want “Default Audio, show English subtitles”.

My current work-around is to set my default language to Japanese with English audio, and my english shows typically don’t have a japanese track. I haven’t had the old movies audio track thing, but I don’t think I have a lot of media like that.

And then I have subtitles always on, which is also undesirable, because if I set the default audio language to Japanese, it then thinks English counts as “Foreign”, because it goes by audio track, rather than using my preferred subtitle language to determine what my native language is. It almost feels like you need an additional Plex server to handle each language properly right now, and that’s dumb.

Please let us set preferred audio track to “default” without having to manually turn on subtitles for each foreign language video we start.

Setting subtitle preferences on a per-show or per-movie basis would also be fantastic solutions to the problem. Preferably not per-library though, I like that my libraries are sorted by genre (it got too slow with all my shows in one library) - and I don’t want to have to have an additional library for each genre if the default audio track isn’t english.

[Senor_El_Borrego]

Still waiting for Plex to play the user assigned default stream instead of INcorrectly playing the stream it wants to play.

I’m just tired of having to set which stream Plex should play, when I already set the default audio stream and subtitle streams in my files.

Every other player plays them correctly, but Plex insists on playing what it wants.

[Black-Kat]

Honouring the default audio flag in MKV files is a frequent request on this forum, and warrants attention from the Plex devs, IMO. All we need is a check box in the Language preferences somewhere, something like:

Prefer default language flags in media files if present

And bam! Solves a lot of headaches for those who like watching series with foreign audio.

[FrequencyLost]

+1 for this. Plex in its current form is awful for subbed Anime or any foreign language folder.

I’m experiencing the exact same scenario as Darkholme. There is no suitable workaround other than remuxing all affected MKV files.

As mentioned by Black-Kat, Plex honouring default audio and subtitle flags in MKV files with a check box would solve all these problems.

[gfitzpatrick]

I’d like this as well. My Dad was just asking me why when he tried to watch The Maltese Falcon, it was playing with commentary. I was confused since I’m pretty good about setting the main audio track to be set as the default. Checked the file and it has the first track (mono) set as default, but Plex selected the second track (stereo) for playback. Having an option for Plex to respect the default track settings would be awesome.

[Adam-Catalyst]

Or even simpler. Just don’t change the audio track selection from a mono track to a multi-channel track. Just don’t do it. Or give us a toggle to disable this unwanted behaviour.

[usenet]

I want this feature too
Emby read default audio flag from video file, can we get the same thing for Plex?

in Emby
Playback → Audio
tick Play default audio track regardless of language

[usenet]

The way I got around for my Karaoke setup is I set the track I want to be default to some ISO language code like eng for English using mkvpropedit.exe then set Plex to play default in that language and it works perfect, it literally takes a second to process 1 file, I wrote one liner for loop script to go through all my karaoke video and change the audio tracks language and it takes like a few minutes to get it all done

[Senor_El_Borrego]

This is one of the things I mentioned about Plex not playing the correct audio track, but they ghosted me after mentioning that commentary tracks are not usually to correct language to listen to.

[Teraslilja]

I am also missing similar functionality (respecting media files default tracks), except I want it to for sub titles too.

[JamesSniep]

I too am having this issue. Plex wants to play the commentary track becuase its stereo, instead of the actual film audio, which is in mono. A Ton TON ton of older movies have mono audio, which is a large focus of my collection. Having these all play the wrong audio by default is confusing and difficult to explain to people. Can i please have Plex automatically play only the first track?

[Black-Kat]

Is there any new word about this feature request?

[dukdukgoos]

Really need this bug fix worked on! For example I have a mkv file with 3 English audio tracks, the third of which is marked as default. Plex always chooses the first track and ignores the “default” tag on the 3rd track. Only way to resolve it currently is to remux the file and change the track order so the default track is always first, but we shouldn’t have to do that.

[Senor_El_Borrego]

The word is “GetLost.”

[FrequencyLost]

4 years on and still not fixed.

Works on Emby.
Works on Jellyfin.
Does not work on Plex.

[StephenCleary]

I’d like the ability to select on the server which audio stream is the default stream.

In particular, I have the BluRay rips of Dick Van Dyke, where the original audio is mono but the commentaries are stereo. Plex defaults to the commentary track.

Currently I’m working around this by ffmpeg’ing the mono to stereo, causing Plex to select the first (original audio) track. But I’d rather not do this.