Since there isn’t a feature request for this, that is currently open I’m going to write a detailed post of the issue, why it matters and many ways it can be approached from the developer’s perspective. I do understand that content outside of American English is largely not a priority for Plex; nevertheless this is a desirable feature, especially for those of us who dabble in foreign media.
Here’s an overview of how I have my media library currently configured (this has little impact for the feature, but should be specified regardless):
- Movies (English)
- Movies (Japanese)
- TV Shows (English)
- TV Shows (Japanese)
Some of the Japanese shows are dual-audio, some are not. Regardless I would prefer to hear the glorious nippon voice actors if possible.
Currently, I have to choose between three less than desirable scenarios:
- Select Japanese as my default audio track, with English for subtitles and Always Show subtitles selected. This results in Japanese on shows that have it, falling back to usually English for those that do not, but always has subtitles on. So I must disable them for each English show individually.
2.) Select English as my default audio track, with English for subtitles and Show Subtitles with Foreign Audio selected. This results having to change the audio track for every single Japanese show that is dual or multi-audio.
3.) Select Japanese as my default audio track, with English for subtitles and Show Subtitles set to Never. This results in having to enable subtitles for every single Japanese show.
Alternatively, I can transcode my entire foreign-language library with copy video and copy audio and drop any non-native audio tracks. This will result in no loss in quality, but will make these copies invalid as backups, and take a substantial amount of time/storage space to complete.
Solutions come in many forms of varying user interaction and have their own drawbacks and advantages:
1.) Add language settings for each library. This makes the MOST sense. It’s not (that) hard to implement, and results in easy to understand consequences for changing language settings for a library. It also comes with a substantial drawback: If you set Japanese for the entire foreign language library, and there is a German show with Japanese audio available - you’ll be in for a surprise.
2.) Add a secondary “native language” option. This is probably the least sensible to users, but easiest of all to implement. For example setting Native to Englsih and Preferred audio to Japanese, followed by setting “Show subtitles for Foreign Audio” would enable subtitles for ANY non-English content, while preferring Japanese audio tracks.
3.) Similar to the above; you could add a “Prefer audio tracks in Native Language” option which would require IMDB/TVDB/Etc lookup for what language the show originally aired in. This would be complicated to implement, but would be nearly seamless to a user with a well maintained library. The drawback here being that if the user doesn’t keep their library well groomed, the feature won’t work well if at all.
I suppose an option (albeit prohibitive for almost all users, including myself) is to set up a secondary PMS for foreign content of each language required, and set settings on each of those instances for proper subtitle/language support. At that point you may as well just use Windows Media Player, though.
