Hi guys, I’ve used the search function and seen this mentioned many times but never a solution. I have a lot of older movies with mono audio tracks but with commentary tracks in stereo. No matter what I do plex will always pick the stereo commentary track over the mono film audio and I’ll have to change it manually. The mono track is the first audio track and is set as default for all of my films and I’ve even tried setting the track to forced with no luck. Why can’t Plex just use the default track like all other media players I have used?
I saw a post here from 2 years ago where @OttoKerner mentions this is a bug. Why has nothing ever been done about this? Am I just missing something obvious? It’s the same on Plex for PC, iOS and Fire Stick 4K. There is another post here compiling some other posts with this same issue. Thanks for any help!
You might want to re-read that thread… nobody’s saying it’s a but.
Otto explains that Plex will remember your selection – but yes, the auto-selection is going for the best available audio track of that language as Plex has no concept of regular vs. commentary audio tracks.
Setting it once for your movie will show it correctly on all your devices (for your account).
What do you mean? Does he not say it is a bug in the last post?
“So we have here an example where the default mechanism to determine the best audio track is failing. I will file that as a bug.”
I understand that I can make a selection on my account it will stay selected but this doesn’t apply to any of the people I share my server with. The track will still be incorrect for all of them. I can’t be expected to send a list of these films to everyone sharing my server telling them to go manually change the audio track for these films.
I seem to have missed that final sentence.
Not sure you’ll get a fix for that… keep in mind each user will have their own language preferences. So you picking an alternative audio track will be hard to translate as an “admin decision” that this is supposed to be a general decision/override, making it the primary track for that particular language. There’s limits to what software can determine unless there’s some additional tags added to flag commentary tracks. The MP4/M4V container has a concept for that but from what I’ve see that’s the only one… so not sure Plex can easily apply that kind of determination across other containers etc.
In the short term, I would address this by either expanding the primary audio track to stereo, converting the commentary track to mono, or both.
If you’re interested I could wrangle up a quick ffmpeg command line to do the job.
I’m not suggesting that it’s ideal, only that it would address the symptoms.
It seems like it would be a simple solution for Plex to just have an option to just automatically pick the first or default audio track? Or to just turn off it’s “smart” audio track picking entirely? It seems like if plex can read that an audio track is tagged as English in an MKV then it could also read if the track is tagged default or forced?
Thanks for the offer but I’ve got hundreds of these movies and I’d rather not have to do something that drastic just to be able to mark a default audio track
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