Persistent "Sticky" Audio and Subtitle Track Selection at Series Level

Feature Suggestions
1

Feature Request: Persistent "Sticky" Audio and Subtitle Track Selection at Series Level

Tags: playback, tv-shows, ux, subtitles, audio

Summary

I am proposing a "sticky" logic for audio and subtitle track selection within a TV series. Once a user manually selects a specific track for an episode, Plex should remember this preference and automatically apply it to all subsequent episodes of the same series.

Context & Problem

Currently, Plex's automatic selection relies on global account settings. While this works for general use, it fails for specific shows that deviate from a user's standard language (e.g., watching an Anime in Japanese or a foreign thriller in its original language).

If the desired track is not the first one in the file, users must manually change the audio and subtitle settings for every single episode. This is a significant friction point in the user experience, especially during binge-watching sessions.

Proposed Workflow

  1. User starts S01E01 of a series.
  2. User manually changes the audio track from "English" to "Japanese" and enables "English Subtitles".
  3. Plex flags this Series GUID with these specific track preferences.
  4. When S01E02 starts (or is viewed in the pre-play screen), Plex automatically selects the Japanese track and English subtitles, overriding global defaults for this specific series.

Current Workarounds

Users currently have to:

  • Manually select tracks for every episode before playing.
  • Use third-party external tools like PASTA to batch-update the database for a series.
  • Change global account settings, which negatively impacts the rest of the library.

Benefits

  • Improved UX: Drastically reduces manual clicks for international content.
  • Consistency: Aligns Plex with the behavior of other modern streaming platforms.
  • Personalization: Allows for library-specific or series-specific viewing habits without micromanaging global settings.
2

You can already set the preferred language for audio and subtitles on the show and season levels.

  1. Edit the respective record ( :pencil: )
  2. Go to the Advanced tab
  3. Set your preferred language

Show/Season language preferences in Plex Web
Show/Season language preferences in Plex Web895×647 60.6 KB

3

Thank you for your reply! I know that. The Problem is that I have at least 7 different languages in my library. They can be grouped in 2 groups of languages (one is german/english and the other one is baltic languages and russian). Because my baltic language is never the primary one, I put my preferred language on that one.
Now the other “group” I cant prefer english over german, because I already set a baltic language. If I would have the possibility to rank the preferred languages that would be a workaround for me (upvoted another suggestion that has something like that).

I dont know if I could explain my problem.

Nethertheless I personally would like the sticky Audio selection so if I want to watch a series in german or english and both are available that the selection carries for the whole series.

4

Ah sorry, I misread your post. Thanks for your reply. I will immediately try that.

5

So they see the use-case for making an override for a single season within a series, but we can’t get one implemented for the library level? What a joke.

6

You can for shows and seasons. There’s a separate suggestion to allow overriding the preferences per library.

7

Yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing – overriding on almost all my live action shows, since content changes more rapidly in the anime libraries. But if I could just change it at the library level I wouldn’t need to do any show-level changes and things would just work as categorized.

Voted on that. I thought I’d already voted for the feature, but maybe it was some other version of the suggestion that got closed.