Preferred audio selection across stacked media

[joshinils 14]

Let's say I prefer English sound, and have two files for the same episode, one with German sound (episode name - de.mkv) and one with English (episode name - en.mkv).
Lexicographically the "de" comes before "en", so Emby automatically chooses the first one to play, but it does not have any audio track with my preferred audio language, however another file does.

I'd like for it to choose the preferred language first, then by lexicographical sorting.

The problem is, that the English version does not contain the same content that the German one has, so it is impossible for me to merge one video with both audio at the same time.

[joshinils 14]

I also noticed, it doesn't remember which version I was watching, just the time to skip forward to.

So when I watch the second stacked file, stop, and resume, I end up somewhere in the first media file.

[GrimReaper 4966]

1 hour ago, joshinils said:

I also noticed, it doesn't remember which version I was watching, just the time to skip forward to.

So when I watch the second stacked file, stop, and resume, I end up somewhere in the first media file.

That's the caveat of using multi-versioning for different cuts (something that feature was originally not intended for), you're bound to occasionally stumble upon a hurdle. As far as Emby is concerned, that is the same item, Emby doesn't discern between 'versions' for tracking purposes. 

1 hour ago, joshinils said:

I prefer English sound, and have two files for the same episode, one with German sound (episode name - de.mkv) and one with English (episode name - en.mkv).
Lexicographically the "de" comes before "en", so Emby automatically chooses the first one to play, but it does not have any audio track with my preferred audio language, however another file does.

That wouldn't be correct, version to be played is not alphabetically first version but the one that would play most efficiently on selected client app; so you might see "en" version preselected on some client apps, while "de" version preselected on others. And no, currently you cannot select default version to be played. 

[Luke 42421]

@joshinilsdoes this answer your questions?
 

More control over this is possible for future updates. Thanks.

[dprovencher 3]

+1, here is my take on the same issue :

 

 

Let's say I have a multi-version episode in a tv-show.  Let's take my exact problem at the moment to explain.

 

S01E01 - Title.eng.mkv (only one en audio track in it)

S01E01 - Title.fra.mkv (only one fr audio track in it)

 

User has "fr" as primary language, but the en track gets selected first, so I guess alphabetical order.

 

I can't remux those files, different contents (fr is regular version, en is my blueray extended version)

[Luke 42421]

4 hours ago, dprovencher said:

+1, here is my take on the same issue :

 

 

Let's say I have a multi-version episode in a tv-show.  Let's take my exact problem at the moment to explain.

 

S01E01 - Title.eng.mkv (only one en audio track in it)

S01E01 - Title.fra.mkv (only one fr audio track in it)

 

User has "fr" as primary language, but the en track gets selected first, so I guess alphabetical order.

 

I can't remux those files, different contents (fr is regular version, en is my blueray extended version)

Currently multi-version is used to distinguish separate qualities, so that is the criteria that determines which one is chosen. Then after that, the language preferences are used to select tracks within that version.

It sounds like you want the language preferences to be used as the criteria for selecting a version. This is doable but unusual in the sense that I don't recall seeing it before. I think the most practical solution is to remux into one file in order to improve automatic selection.

[dprovencher 3]

11 minutes ago, Luke said:

Currently multi-version is used to distinguish separate qualities, so that is the criteria that determines which one is chosen. Then after that, the language preferences are used to select tracks within that version.

It sounds like you want the language preferences to be used as the criteria for selecting a version. This is doable but unusual in the sense that I don't recall seeing it before. I think the most practical solution is to remux into one file in order to improve automatic selection.

I can't remux those files, different contents (fr is regular version, en is my blueray extended version)

 

I agree it's very rare, but I stumbled on this yesterday in my library and it's really not user friendly at all.  I have the same problem as @joshinilsand would like this request to happen, so here's my vote.

 

In my example the 1st preferred language of the user is not in the first file, but is in the second.  You could check the tracks of the versions and make sure to select one, or the first, which contains the preferred language, then the 2nd preferred language if the first is not found, etc.

 

I think having the preferred language is way more important than having the "best-match" quality and should be checked first.

[Luke 42421]

13 minutes ago, dprovencher said:

I think having the preferred language is way more important than having the "best-match" quality and should be checked first.

Yes different things are important to different people. I understand.

[dprovencher 3]

Maybe filter by language the versions only if the user has configured a preferred language?  This way it wouldn't "break" existing behavior and everybody would be happy?

As of now, I can understand this is working ok for movies, where you browse to an item yourself, and you see you have choices.  Maybe not every user will see those choices and be aware of what they do but they at least can see something.

For tv shows it just does not work, if you have multi-version episodes that are not related to the video quality only, well the first one gets selected and you have nothing to say about it, you don't even see you had a choice (just press play next when the previous episode is over).

I can't remux those files, and duplicating the whole show for 5% of episodes is not a realistic option.

Thanks,

Edited 22 minutes ago by dprovencher

[joshinils 14]

Maybe a semi-hacky solution could be to split your library into separate folders, each containing only the versions with the same language(s).

Then give separate users differing access to these folders. That way they can only see one version in their account, not the other version.

I know this can seem like a nuisance to need to sort all your media like this, but I believe that could work if the person/account has no interest to ever see the other versions (I do, so this hack wouldn't work for myself). The playback time saved would also be in reference to "their" version, so that wouldn't matter either.

I can think of a script (python or maybe bash) which inspects each files audio streams, their tagged language, and moves the files into respective folders, this could be done in a tree-system, where in avroot folder there could be "en+" (no french), "fr+" (no english), "en,fr,+", "remainder" (neither en, nor fr), inside which you could split further, by precise language(s) present, their order, count, audio layout, or merge these as a set and sort if that's not important.

Then if you unselect the "en+" folder for the other account, they don't have access to those versions (even though emby has access to them, and they're merged), so they can't select it, and it always sticks to the selecting from the files available.

 

I've done something similar for extras and various files, looking for "duplicates", or splits of a main file, which usually meant they are all the same across these metadata (except duration), then I could sort through a simpler, smaller subset by hand.

I also used various other scripts to sort movies once they're done, into their decade-folder, rename extras, put them into the respective extras folder inside and whatnot, I don't quite remember what else, been a while since I used all that.

Edited 6 minutes ago by joshinils