I think this has been brought up before, but a critical feature needs to be added!
Static defaults for subtitles (movies with forced foreign subtitles) and static default for audio track.
An example tonight. Playing “Rocketman” Blu-ray raw mic rip. For whatever reason PMS chose the visually impaired audio track describing everything on the screen (5.1 track) instead of the main 7.1 TrueHD track.
A couple of different examples of subtitle tracks are 1) “Don’t Mess with the Zohan”. There’s an entire scene that is driven from the subtitle track. If the subtitles are not on you’re just starting at a dark screen with the sound of something typing. 2) The movie “Burnt” has some French dialogue and no subtitles.
If I could permanently set the correct audio and subtitles from the server side these issues could be resolved.
What client type are you using?
All clients I personally use, allow me to select audio and subtitle stream before starting playback. This selection is stored on the server and used on all other clients from then on.
I have almost one of every client I think. But my main client is the Nvidia Shield.
So you’re saying that if my account chooses a subtitle and audio track, any and every home or shared user, will hear the audio track I selected and see the subtitles I selected?
No. This track selection is “by account”.
If you need automatic selection of forced subtitles, make sure that
your audio tracks are tagged with the right language
your subtitle tracks are tagged with both language and, if applicable, with the ‘forced’ attribute
the language preferences of you and each of your users are set accordingly
Example: If your native language is English, then set
Automatically select audio and subtitle tracks
PREFERRED AUDIO LANGUAGE = English
PREFERRED SUBTITLE LANGUAGE = English
AUTO-SELECT SUBTITLE MODE = Shown with foreign Audio
I already had those settings in place and the results are as stated above.
I don’t expect software to choose these settings for me as that’s next to impossible to get correct all of the time. That’s why a manual selection for default subtitles and audio track is necessary.
The automatic selection only works on items where the user hasn’t touched the manual selectors yet. As soon as he does that, it works as I wrote above.
And the Android TV client does have a manual track selector.
The srt files shown with ‘name tagging’ - the 2 embedded tracks are flagged within as well:
(MediaInfo)
General
Unique ID : 27smegalamonga
Complete name : G:\TV - Sci-Fi\Star Trek Picard\Season 01\Star Trek Picard - S01E04 - Absolute Candor.mkv
Format : Matroska
Format version : Version 4
File size : 958 MiB
Duration : 44 min 6 s
Overall bit rate : 3 037 kb/s
Encoded date : UTC 2020-02-14 08:07:25
Writing application : Lavf58.26.100
Writing library : Lavf58.26.100
ErrorDetectionType : Per level 1
Video
ID : 1
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile : High@L4.1
Format settings : CABAC / 4 Ref Frames
Format settings, CABAC : Yes
Format settings, Reference frames : 4 frames
Codec ID : V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC
Duration : 44 min 6 s
Bit rate : 2 650 kb/s
Width : 1 920 pixels
Height : 800 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 2.40:1
Frame rate mode : Variable
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Stream size : 818 MiB (85%)
Writing library : x264 core 157 r2935 545de2f
Encoding settings : cabac=1 / ref=3 / deblock=1:0:0 / analyse=0x3:0x113 / me=hex / subme=7 / psy=1 / psy_rd=1.00:0.00 / mixed_ref=1 / me_range=16 / chroma_me=1 / trellis=1 / 8x8dct=1 / cqm=0 / deadzone=21,11 / fast_pskip=1 / chroma_qp_offset=-2 / threads=12 / lookahead_threads=2 / sliced_threads=0 / nr=0 / decimate=1 / interlaced=0 / bluray_compat=0 / constrained_intra=0 / bframes=3 / b_pyramid=2 / b_adapt=1 / b_bias=0 / direct=1 / weightb=1 / open_gop=0 / weightp=2 / keyint=240 / keyint_min=24 / scenecut=40 / intra_refresh=0 / rc_lookahead=40 / rc=2pass / mbtree=1 / bitrate=2650 / ratetol=1.0 / qcomp=0.60 / qpmin=0 / qpmax=69 / qpstep=4 / cplxblur=20.0 / qblur=0.5 / vbv_maxrate=62500 / vbv_bufsize=78125 / nal_hrd=none / filler=0 / ip_ratio=1.40 / aq=1:1.00
Language : English
Default : Yes
Forced : No
Color range : Limited
Color primaries : BT.709
Transfer characteristics : BT.709
Matrix coefficients : BT.709
Audio
ID : 2
Format : AC-3
Format/Info : Audio Coding 3
Commercial name : Dolby Digital
Codec ID : A_AC3
Duration : 44 min 6 s
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 384 kb/s
Channel(s) : 6 channels
Channel layout : L R C LFE Ls Rs
Sampling rate : 48.0 kHz
Frame rate : 31.250 FPS (1536 SPF)
Bit depth : 16 bits
Compression mode : Lossy
Stream size : 121 MiB (13%)
Title : English
Writing library : Lavc58.46.100 ac3_fixed
Language : English
Service kind : Complete Main
Default : Yes
Forced : No
Text #1
ID : 3
Format : UTF-8
Codec ID : S_TEXT/UTF8
Codec ID/Info : UTF-8 Plain Text
Duration : 42 min 1 s
Language : English
Default : No
Forced : Yes
Text #2
ID : 4
Format : UTF-8
Codec ID : S_TEXT/UTF8
Codec ID/Info : UTF-8 Plain Text
Duration : 43 min 3 s
Language : English
Default : No
Forced : No
Doing that, Plex knows exactly what to do with ALL the tracks (as there are no ‘Unknowns’) - when to do it - and I can over-ride anything by manual selection (with a bit of guess-work in spots - granted).
It is so frustrating trying to get help here. Neither one of you are even remotely close to giving any type of useful advice to the very detailed issue I posted above.
PREFERRED AUDIO LANGUAGE = Native/default (not to my region or player, but the work in question)
PREFERRED SUBTITLE LANGUAGE = English, but…
AUTO-SELECT SUBTITLE MODE = Shown with foreign audio (when Audio is not English)
It seems there is no concept of “Native to the original work” audio track, and Plex doesn’t believe me when I set the “default” flag in MKV to designate a language as such (e.g., Korean for “Parasite”, Japanese for Anime, French for French films, etc.).
And it seems Plex as a product is insistent that “native/default” language is a player setting. I can understand how it shouldn’t be a SERVER setting, but it definitely should allow for a MEDIA value being respected!
Fine, I can sort of deal with that. What I can’t understand is how those three settings,
PREFERRED AUDIO LANGUAGE = None (because I don’t want it to flip to English for non-English original shows/movies, of which I have a lot of)
PREFERRED SUBTITLE LANGUAGE = English
AUTO-SELECT SUBTITLE MODE = Shown with foreign audio
Results in all my movies and shows coming up with English subtitles. Even the ones in English!
I don’t remember this being a problem until I started trying to get non-English audio tracks on by default, with English subtitles without my selecting them manually every time. But now I can’t figure out how to get it to go back. I’m constantly disabling subtitles!
I added SubZero as an agent recently, is that a factor in this?
