The {edition-tagname} works well on Movies, but not on TV episodes… I recently found this enhancement to how the naming can work for PLEX, and I started to use it for telling my PLEX & ROKU combination to work using different .mp4 files for English vs Japanese… While this is acceptable for Movies, it would be nice it if also worked on TV episodes.
NOTE: The reason that I am doing it like this is cause MKV doesn’t seem to work on a ROKU with PLEX well enough, in that I can’t specify language & subtitles combinations. So, I’ve been forced to keep 2 libraries for the different languages (English without subtitles for myself vs. Japanese with subtitles for my wife) for Japanese Animes that she is getting via MP4 with forced subtitles embedded. If I could use the {edition-tagname} at least it could merge these into a single library…
Language selection has nothing to do with MKV vs. MP4 containers. In fact, I consider MKV superior in this regard. Particularly because it has support for every relevant flag.
The source of the issue lies with the current simplistic approach which Plex takes to automatic stream selection. It only ever works correctly for people who prefer one language and set this language for both audio and subtitle on their account’s preferences. https://app.plex.tv/desktop/#!/settings/account
In a perfect world, you’d only have to store one video track. Together with 2 audio tracks and how many subtitle tracks you require.
video
audio English
audio Japanese
subtitle English “forced” (i.e. all the translations for Japanese signs/text on screen and maybe the credits and opening karaoke)
Thanks for the context. Though, I guess – I would like for the feature to be expanded to include Episodes.
Beyond the considerations of Japanese Animes, if I wanted to look at some TV shows, like Red Dwarf or Star Trek Original Series, they have up to 3 different released editions of the same episodes (TV original, TV Extended scenes, and Director’s Cut) all in the same languages during it’s first 6 seasons. That would be useful to also be able to spell out the differences. This is another example of how {edition-**} can be useful. Or for that matter, if you could do it at the TV Show Title level, that would allow for the merger and sorting of the same TV show even if they are using different language combinations.
Additionally, to your point… that would be a nice feature to have added full MKV support that would allow for PLEX to select all of the different options as needed for a viewer, as you mentioned. I would certainly would prefer to keep a singular file that can correctly access the details, instead of forced remuxing of all files to a specific set of specifications. Since my TV only supports upscaled 1080i, I’ve kept my files re-muxed at that level. But if these options were available as you mentioned, I would worry about upgrading my storage array to support a future 4K TV with the files accordingly.
