Movies by Language

[mtjj 31]

Not quite sure if this should go into a specific sub-forum - apologies and please could a mod move it if this is the case! 

 

I would like to browse movies by language. I know this isn't built in functionality, but there seem to be a few ways of achieving what I'm looking for, so hoping for some guidance on what other people have done. I don't mind going though each movie individually and adjusting the metadata if necessary, as I'm fairly sure there's no way to do this automatically. When I say language I mean the original language in which the movie was produced. I do have a few dubs of foreign films without the original audio but those are edge cases and I can handle those manually. Browsing via the web client, Emby Theatre on windows, and android.

• IMDB and TMDB have a "language" field for the movie. This is what I would ideally like to search by, however this doesn't seem to be extracted and stored by Emby. So that's out
  
• Second best option is that audio channels have a language associated with them, that is displayed in Emby. However it's not possible to browse or filter by these (as far as I can tell?). So that's out.
  
• I could add a tag for each language - and this can be used to limit browsing, only user by user (again, as far as I can tell?) - so I could have one user for browsing chinese movies, another for english.... but this seems a little inconvenient....
  
• I could add language as a Genre. This would allow browsing by language, and I can call the genres whatever I want. The only thing is that I guess I have to lock genre from be automatically overwritten and then manually manage all my genres.
  
• Alternatively, I could use "Studio" to manage language - this makes me wince from a database management perspective but it achieves what I want without messing up genres - and as I will never use studio for anything else, it seems harmless. (I don't really see why anyone would ever want to browse by studio, but hey, each to his own...)
  
• Finaly there is a field called "country" under metadata settings. I can't work out what this does, so probably best not to touch this....
  
• Edit: oh, and one other option, I could also make a collection for each language. Not sure if this is better or worse than the other options...
  

 

Any comments or suggestions? As it stands I think overwriting "studio" with the language is probably my best choice?

 

(Incidentally, for language codes, which set of ISO three letter codes are best to use - 639-2/T or 639-2/B? E.g. Chinese is zho in /T, chi in /B. In the nfo files, Chinese audio streams are indicated as "zho", but Emby seems to expect "chi" for subtitles. Is this an inconsistency or am I missing something? )

Edited October 14, 2016 by mtjj