8 mo. ago • 97%

10 hours of search and code for that. It was worth it, right? Right?

Now I don't have to : right-click > english audio and right-click > french subtitle. It launches every video of the season ready to go. It was worth it, right?
Now it's time to enjoy my day. Oh wait! (it's 6 am here)

38 comments

You could have saved hours by just using mkvpropedit writing a simple 3 line bash script that loops through your files.

Just saying 🤷🏼

39
- Maybe it took ten hours to find this solution?
  
  20
  
  9 hours and 59 minutes to find the solution, 60 seconds to write the code.
  
  14
- That's what I already did. And finding the good mkvpropedit command was long.
  But here I wanted to automate that and just having to choose the audio and subtitles languages and it executes the mkvpropedit command.
  
  2
  
  Thanks for sharing your script :) I never thought you would need such a complex (not a programmer so it's complex for me xD) script. This seems a full automation and looks great ! Well done, it was worth it !
  
  2
- I'm not sure if it's fixed now but a few years ago Plex ignored the properties and played the first audio stream it found. I had Scooby Doo with Portuguese as the first audio track and although mkvpropedit worked when playing back in VLC, in Plex it would still play Portuguese as default. I had to re merge the streams with English as the first track for Plex to play English by default.
  
  1
  
  Plex has a built in solution for that now
  
  2
  
  I'm thinking of 2 3 issues here.
  
  Either your file had the propertie flag --forced-display-flag for the audio track 1 and this would force the audio 1 to play even if you changed the flag-default with mkvpropedit. In that case you have no other choice to remux your file with mkvmerge and change the flag to --forced-display-flag 1:no (if it's the audio track 1) I have no idea why someome would force an audio track....
  
  Or you didn't used the --edit track:s1 flag with the flag-default propertie, which uses mkvmerge under the hood. Reading through my notes there is a superuser.com link talking specifically about that, and how it could fuck up your tracks order if you don't use the track flag.
  
  Edit: This is only true if your player is capable to select the audio based on the flag default or forced. Otherwise you have to remux the file and change the order of tracks with the --track-order flag with mkvmerge. ~~This could be the case for Plex, you can probably find that info in the plex documentation !~~
  
  Edit2: Plex seems to use both but I would suspect plex or bad flags being the culprit here rather than mkvtools.
  
  2
Share your code? (Or is it like mine, and shameful)

26
- I could but I would have to comment it a little more. If I don't forget I'll share it later in response of your message.
  
  29
  
  Or you could just post it and then fix it up later
  
  16
  
  Why not share it and then let others comment it? Something like that should work.
  
  1
- Here it is. I took the time to comment it well and rearrange some things.
  It's in 2 files :
  https://pastebin.com/FQ7xqNSt
  https://pastebin.com/6S3qesWc
  Keep the file names I chose when copy/pasting. Read the loop file to see how to use it quickly.
  I forgot to say in the loop script’s quick explanations that you need mkvmerge and mkvpropedit from MKVToolNix (put it in the PATH variable if needed) and nodejs to make that script work.
  
  3
- I forgot to say in the loop script's quick explanations that you need mkvmerge and mkvpropedit from MKVToolNix (put it in the PATH variable if needed) and nodejs to make that script work.
  
  2
Why waste 5 seconds every time to want to watch a video, when you can waste 10 hours writing a script to automate it?

That's just how we programmers roll

19
- Exactly!
  
  2
but did you make the script agpl3?

10
- I think you're talking about the licence and for the moment I didn't have time to think about what licences I should use and primarly what are the licences existing.
  
  1
  
  agplv3 is the most copyleft one
  
  1
U can configure that in vlc

5
- Yes, and VLC respects the default and forced flags of the tracks, unlike MPC. But I'm so used to MPC and I prefer it.
  
  1
You didn’t ask ChatGPT to write it for you???

5
- Maybe he wanted something that could actually run?
  
  4
  
  you can massage LLM code into working faster than doing it from scratch if you do it right
  
  6
- I wanted to do it myself, learn and getting used to dev things again. AI are often wrong on some details but I used it sometimes and it can help a lot for parts of code or understanding some things.
  
  2
I think you can put a list of preferred languages in the conf file. At least most mpv guis allow setting that somewhere.

4
Btw Celluloid is the best modern MPV GUI with all the goodies like portals. And it supports MPV configs which can solve many VLC issues in a single line, like click-to-play ! Never going back.

3
- Thanks but I'm on Windows. But I'll keep it if I settle on Linux someday.
  
  1
  
  Then I think VLC is the best
  
  1
I literally did the same thing once. But I did it under an hour, if not under 10 minutes, because there is no autocompletion for mpv in Lua.

2
!remindme 10 days

2

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