No. Plex does not know what the native language is for a video.
There are two ways that could be accomplished:
- Plex’s metadata agent gets the info from a source like IMDB. (New Feature request. Ask it now and maybe it will come in 5 years!)
- There is actually an “original language” flag in MKV, but whoever made the file would need to set that on the correct track, and Plex does not currently support it anyway. (also a new feature request). I’m not aware of any video player that actually can read it now, and they would have to add a preference to use the Original Language for playback.
For right now, Plex’s software doesn’t even recognize that people actually enjoy media in more than one language properly. (ha-ha) You can set your account language prefs to the language you want, but you can only choose one language. Then you set the subtitles to “always on” and the preferred language – and you’ll get full dialog subs with that picked language and forced subs when you use English if there is a Forced track.
But subs are always going to be on. So if the program audio is only available in English and there is no Forced subs track, you get the full dialog (Closed Captions) of the English audio and have to turn it off. Thankfully Plex remembers your choice and uses it next time you watch that movie.
This is why the feature of being able to set special audio/subtitle selections for a TV show is so nice. But it would be better if there was such a setting for a whole library, so you could just add a new German TV show to that library and it would use those settings by default without you having to change your language preference for everything.
