Improved audio and subtitle behaviour - Bilingual people and forced subtitles

Feature Suggestions
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Hi everyone. I would love for Plex to bring some QoL improvements, including ones that specially affect bilingual, trilingual, etc. people.

Account settings: native languages

One should be able to choose more than one language which they speak — and ideally the preferred order of those, but this isn’t as important. This is key because if I speak both English and German, I don’t need full subtitles for any of those languages. There could be tick boxes for the common languages to be input into a textbox, but also manually editing that textbox, for example to make a difference between es-419 and es-es.

Account settings: preferred audio

It should inlcude just two settings: original voice and native languages. The Plex Movie Database could store the original voice for each title, but also MKV has a flag for original voice, so it could come from there. Just because I speak Spanish doesn’t mean I want to watch the movies in Spanish. I prefer them with the voices of the original actors.

Account settings: forced subtitle behaviour

For every audio selected that you mark as native, forced subtitles for that language should be always on. Not only that, but forced subtitles shouldn’t appear as an option: you should be able to choose “none” and still get forced subtitles. That is the way every other platform works and it makes sense — that’s why they’re called forced subtitles after all. That way the subtitle selection should be less cluttered. An option to disable forced subtitles could be hidden in case anyone needs it, but that would be the minority of people.

Why this is important

I understand that monolingual English speakers think that the Plex behaviour right now works perfectly. It does for them, and it’s fine. But there’s so much more world out there, and this wouldn’t degrade their experience — it would be exactly the same. From the reddit post I created (check the aknowledgements) you can see that the most voted comments are from people from other countries that like to watch content in more than one language, that want original audio in their movies and series, and so on. I’m of course one of them and find it frustrating to be careful which audio and subs I select everytime I want to watch a movie. I would love for Plex to implement this, as it isn’t as difficult to code as other things.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the team at Plex. I know that sometimes it’s difficult to implement QoL improvements when the pressure to create things that bring more money to the company is also important. Still, after a lot of years I’ve seen the main software to improve a lot, and I wish this continues like this.

Also special thanks to the folks at reddit that helped me find the best way to implement this and criticized my idea.

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It’s so frustrating watching a season of TV where every episode defaults to a French audio track, when it’s 100% an English-speaking production. Changing the audio track the first time is kind of annoying but whatever, but then having to do it every episode is absolutely maddening.

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It’s still anoying but you can do it just once: Open plex from the web browser. Go to the show and go to settings (where you can change the show name, release date, etc). Click on advanced settings, and the third one from the end should be “Preferred audio language”. Change that from French to English and it should now change it for all episodes in that show. You can also do it for just one season if you go to that season’s settings.

1 Like
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Thanks for your suggestions. It appears those have already been asked for, hence please comment/vote in those threads in order to help us avoid distracting or cannibalizing votes. Unless I’ve been missing some different aspects of your suggestion I’ll close this thread as a duplicate.

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I would say my suggestion for what I call native languages is further explained here with the ideas on how to implement it, although in essence the idea is the same as in the post you linked.

In the case of the forced audio idea, I’m not just proposing the same, I’m going one step further saying how it should work (And I’m not cannibalising any votes since it already has just 1). However, I can understand how the rules make me remove this one.

I can concede that the discussion about original language is best discussed in the other forum post, and per the rules I will remove it from this one.

However, as votes are scarce, having to vote for the three separately when they form part of one unified Plex language behaviour improvement seems like a waste. And that’s probably why the smaller proposals don’t get voted much.

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I don’t totally disagree. But… then you end up with competing suggestions about the same/similar fighting over those scarce votes (none getting much attention) — and bundle suggestions have a tendency to get blurry as users have to either agree with all elements or keep squabbling about which aspect they actually prefer / deem an option…

1 Like
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I understand, thanks anyway!

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2024 clean-up: duplicate
While this one has gained some popularity fast, there’s already three existing suggestions addressing the individual requests. Please comment/vote in those threads instead, while I’m closing this one as a duplicate. My apologies for the inconvenience.