Scenario: I have a movie, say “Avatar”, which I have in multiple languages (i.e. credits and forced subtitles are burned in to the video in different languages). These would sit as separate mkv/mp4 files.
Question: How do/should I organise these? Separate files in the same directory, split the items and name them appropriately, or can I use language notation in the file name for Plex to pick up?
Hmm, I suppose it’s up to you. You could allow Plex to combine them into one video entry, someone would be able to select the version they wished to watch. I’m not SURE if you can label each version to indicate the language that it is available in though (I don’t have any multi-version movies to check, but I think it just lists the bitrate/resolution), so it’d be hard to tell which is which I think.
Personally, I think I’d separate them out, and manually edit the metadata for each entry to GLARINGLY INDICATE that it is a version of language “X”. In the title, as well as the description.
That or, if I had enough of these, a completely separate library for each language.
/Movies - English
-/Avatar.mkv
/Movies - French
-/Avatar (French).mkv
etc, and make a separate library pointing to each Movies - LANGUAGE folder. This way, if someone wants to view a particular movie in a particular language, it’s easier to see what movies you have in that language by choosing the library in particular.
Edit: I just browsed the Multi-version Movies support article. It’s pretty empty of any help here. It suggests a naming convention, but it’s purely for keeping tack of which file is which, and indicates that it will ignore text after the release year and will NOT pick that up.
I wager that they expect people to combine videos into a single master video file with one video track, and multiple audio and subtitle tracks. With appropriate language markers on the audio and subtitle tracks, Plex will auto-select the language of both tracks as set up by your account language preferences for you, if they are available. This sucks, of course, if you use hard-subbed (burned in) language options, such as end-credits or “forced” subs for some dialog in some movies. John Wick 2 is one such example I can think of, where the female assassin who is using sign language to talk is represented using burnt-in stylized subs, which would not work for single-video files.
You can’t.
Plex currently considers different “versions” to be different quality versions of the otherwise exactly same video.
There’s a few related feature suggestions to expand the information in the version selector or provide support for handling different editions of a movie.
As for the OP’s specific use cases… the question is if/why you need to burn those subtitles into the videos in the first place. Is that because your clients don’t support soft subtitles?
Personally I’ve been going with the suggestion mentioned by dividedby0 and put my alternative cuts / editions in a separate library (for now). This way they don’t get “in the way”.
In my setup this includes movies with different language video content (e.g. Pixar movies with translated text sections or the Star Wars “flying text”. They currently get the same treatment as movies for which I own different cuts 
You could use the “Split Apart” function to separate these movies, and then manually edit the title in Plex to reflect what they are.
In my movie library I often have 4K HDR and 1080p versions of the same movie. I recently had to split apart all of them as a workaround for a few issues I had with the Downloads functionality.
For example, here’s what the movie Scream currently looks like in my library:
I guess you could do something similar and identify each version appropriately.
Here’s another example of handling multiple versions of a movie.
Plex does not currently handle the situation well. Find the workaround that best fits your needs and go with it.
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