Let me first begin with the following information that will blow your mind: French (France) and French (Canada) titles are different for some movies.
So I’ve been attempting (unsuccessfully) over the past few days to get my movies showing up with the Canadian French titles. My only option for library language is “Français”, so I’m using that. I’ve tried file name trickery, using different agents, turning on and off localized titles, with no success. I’m only ever able to get the French (France) titles (or the English titles when my configuration attempts failed miserably). The best config I found is with the “Plex Movie” agent set to look at TMDB for description (I get English descriptions no matter what if I use iMDB).
The issue seems to be that, due to the library language being set to French and not Canadian French (a non-existing option), TMDB is queried with “language=fr” instead of “language=fr-CA”.
Let’s look at some examples.
A bug’s life (1998): This movie is named “Une vie de bestiole” in Canadian French and “1001 pattes” in French (France). I named my file “Une vie de bestiole (1998).avi”. View iMDB link here for confirmation of title differences (check “Canada (French title)” vs “France” fields in the AKAs): imdb.com/title/tt0120623/releaseinfo?ref_=tt_dt_dt#akas
Now for the metadata used by Plex. I found the movie on TMDB and manually changed the language in the following links to show the translated metadata: themoviedb.org/movie/9487-a-bug-s-life?language=fr themoviedb.org/movie/9487-a-bug-s-life?language=fr-CA
In the first link, you see what I see right now in Plex: FR title, FR artwork (with FR title) and FR description. I assume this is exactly the data that Plex is retrieving. In the second link, you see the Canadian French title, but the artwork is still the France one (I assume because there is none for fr-CA right now in the database). That doesn’t bother me too much, at least it’s not falling back to an english artwork.
There doesn’t seem to be a simple solution for this scenario. It doesn’t look like Plex could do anything to fix that, other than simply requesting the fr-CA language when calling the API, but TMDB doesn’t have a good fallback strategy for titles (based on my limited observations).
Best case scenario would be a new library language in Plex which uses “fr-CA” for all data bits (artwork, title, description) but falls back to “fr” when no data (or English data?) is found.
Does that sound like a reasonable idea? Any thoughts?
I have spent I don’t know how many hours trying to find “L’Ère de Glace” 1, 2 and 3. I knew I had these movies but couldn’t figure out where they were. Finally realized they were tagged “L’Âge de Glace” as per our French cousins’ titles.I’m sure the Plex people are listening and will eventually extend their horizon when it comes to languages and regions. As for right now, except for a few exceptions, I have to say i’m pretty impressed with the French support. My parents get their titles, descriptions and even some trailers in French and couldn’t be happier. If the data “fr-CA” already exists on the various databases, sounds like it could be an easy fix for the devs.
Now what would you do if your movie or show’s audio track is “truefrench” or “VFF” from France? Would you still want it to be named after the Quebec version despite having the wrong audio track?
@awsome_mullet@hotmail.com said:
Now what would you do if your movie or show’s audio track is “truefrench” or “VFF” from France? Would you still want it to be named after the Quebec version despite having the wrong audio track?
I probably wouldn’t mind. Worst case, I could create another library with “fr” language. Im envisioning “fr-CA” as another entry in the library language drop-down, just like you can set the Web UI in “French” or “French Canadian”. I found out there are actually separate translations for the Web UI. If that was the case for the library language as well, you could create both a “fr” and “fr-CA” library.
Creating extra libraries works well for searching, not so much for browsing, as you have to browse multiple libraries to find what you’re looking for. 1st world problems. If I could get to that point, I’d be pretty happy either way. What concerns me right now is that there is NO way to instruct Plex to use the “fr-CA” language.
OK so, there doesn’t seem to be anything going on here. I found some more (OLD) info on this forum that seems to go in the direction that I want. This (very old) post:
Provides the following patch, which would solve my issue:
What this patch does is it adds a country selector which, in turn, changes the actual language used when querying TMDB. In my particular case, setting the library language to FR and the country to Canada will query TMDB with “language=fr-CA”. This is what I want!
I’m confused though, there IS a country selector in the current “Plex Movie” and “The Movie Database” agents, but those selectors do not affect the language parameter of the TMDB query. I checked that by refreshing metadata and checking the calls in the PMS logs. Maybe those were added there for a different reason…
I would like to try adding this patch to the current TMDB and/or Plex Movie agents. How would I get involved in PMS development? I’m ready to get my hands dirty and write some code to get this resolved.
