Plex doesn't recognise AVI audio language(s)

[mbirth]

Server Version#: 1.32.8.7639 (Docker)

I’ve just run into the issue reported by @Patric81 here. And Emby seems to have the same issue as discussed here.

As per this SuperUser answer, RIFF/AVI files don’t store their audio stream language with the stream, but in the main header in fields called IAS1 … IAS9 instead.

So I tagged my AVI files (2 languages per file) with this. The languages show up fine in VLC player (not in IINA, though), but Plex doesn’t recognise anything and shows both streams as “Unknown”.

If you want to test it yourself, find an AVI file and run:

ffmpeg -i input.avi -map 0 -codec copy -metadata IAS1=eng output.avi

Then open the output.avi in VLC Player and verify that “English” is shown as the audio language of the first stream. Then, import it into Plex and notice that it show “Unknown” as the language.

Is there any chance to get this implemented into Plex one day?

[OttoKerner]

@mbirth

Is there any chance to get this implemented into Plex one day?

To be honest, this is quite unlikely. AVI is an ancient (and quite crappy/badly specified) format.
I think you are better off remuxing them into the matroska container. That way you get well supported language tags on each stream and (most importantly) much better seeking capability.