[ Resolved]Prime: Can't select English Forced Narrative audio track when

[VideoCollector]

Let's start with an example of what I am talking about...

Bosch: Legacy. Some episodes (not all) have an English forced narrative audio track. This is necessary if you don't speak Russian .

If you chose the option to select all episodes in the season, you will never even see an English forced narrative audio track which makes this option rather useless. Instead, you must select one episode at a time and then select the Forced narrative track, if it exists, for a particular episode.

Even if a series has no forced narrative track, you still need to select each episode one at a time because there is no way to know if a particular episode might have a forced narrative track unless you select each episode one at a time.

This makes the whole feature of being able to select all episodes at once completely useless.

What I would expect: If I select multiple episodes of a season, or the entire season, AnyStream should be intelligent enough to build a list of available audio tracks making a cumulative list out of all selected episodes.

As an example, suppose we have the following:

Episode 1: English
Episode 2: English, English Forced Narrative
Episode 3: English

Now the user selects all episodes. AnyStream should scan the episodes and present as options English and English Forced Narrative since the English Forced Narrative exists in at least one episode.

Tested with AnyStream 1.3.8.4.

 

[DeepSpace]

This is a known thing, but for subtitles. Till now I haven't seen anyone also talking about audio.

Now the user selects all episodes. AnyStream should scan the episodes and present as options English and English Forced Narrative since the English Forced Narrative exists in at least one episode.

If I remember correctly, that has also been requested, but it has been said that that would take a long time to scan everything.
I don't care since I have enough power, but for people with older devices that would indeed be problematic.

When it came up recently, it has been requested to make it an option to let AS always download all available versions of the selected language, but till now I haven't heard anything new about that. Not even that is has been denied, as for many/some other things as well.

 

[Pete]

AnyStream should scan the episodes and present as options English and English Forced Narrative since the English Forced Narrative exists in at least one episode.

You are basically right about this and it is known. Unfortunately, there is no really good solution to it.
This requires gathering and scanning all playlists of all episodes at once. Unfortunately, these playlists are considered a protected element with most providers and are "expensive" to get (require additional authentication, sometimes encryption, ....).
A Series with 50 episodes could easily take over a minute until you even see the selection dialog pop up.
Plus these playlists expire sometimes and need to be downloaded again when the episode actually does start downloading.

So maybe the best alternative would be a checkbox "download forced subtitles, if available" or so. Also has downsides and makes the UI less intuitive.

 

[cartman0208]

So maybe the best alternative would be a checkbox "download forced subtitles, if available" or so. Also has downsides and makes the UI less intuitive.

Why not skip the checkbox and just download the forced subtitle if the corresponding language is selected?
I remember this very same discussion from a while ago and thought that was the way to go?

 

[DeepSpace]

So maybe the best alternative would be a checkbox "download forced subtitles, if available" or so. Also has downsides and makes the UI less intuitive.

A checkbox like this has already been suggested. But why would a little checkbox like that make the UI less intuitive, and even has downsides? It fixes an issue with a simple click.
As already said, this can be made an option in the settings, "Always download all subtitle variants per selected language". I would check and leave it as is forever, since I always download all available versions for the languages I need. And this way it would not clutter the daily UI, only the settings, but again, it only would be a small checkbox in the subs part.

For the people that don't need all subs (even though it is not hard to delete them afterwards, as long as you use srt instead of embedded), there can be additinal boxes. Granted, that would clutter the UI, but if you only make a checkbox for everything someone will come and complain because that person only needs one sub, not all of them and don't want to delete them everytime. Even though this is unnecessary, since they are very small, so no issue in keep them all.

UI:
[] Always download all available variants per language
[] Always download normal subs [] Always download forced subs [] Always download descriptive (CC) subs
You only have two simple rows in the subs region in the settings (if it is possible to get all three things into one row), that will apply for all languages you select when downloading a season.
If you only download one thing, then, of course, they will get overridden by what you select for that single episode or movie.
And when you select the always download everything box, then the other boxes should be greyed out.

I had this open for a while now and cartman said, just skip the checkbox. Well, it is a posibillity but as I already said, then people will start to complain why they always get forced subs without selecting one.

 

[cartman0208]

...then people will start to complain why they always get forced subs without selecting one.

I'd give it a shot and see who is complaining
My bet is, those are less than the ones bringing up the issue of missing forced subtitles

 

[DeepSpace]

I'd give it a shot and see who is complaining
My bet is, those are less than the ones bringing up the issue of missing forced subtitles

Sure, I only already mention it so it does not even happen in the first place.

 

[RedFox 1]

I'd give it a shot and see who is complaining
My bet is, those are less than the ones bringing up the issue of missing forced subtitles

Breaking Bad would have sucked without forced subs.

 

[cartman0208]

So would Better call Saul ... huge cliffhanger on the first part of the sixth season ... can't wait for it to continue in July

 

[BCloud]

I download every episode manually now because of this. A little tip it's if you know that all the subs you want is in one episode you can download all the season from this episode. In your example you can start to download all the episodes from the episode 2 because it will download english and narratives subs in all the following episodes.

You are basically right about this and it is known. Unfortunately, there is no really good solution to it.

I already suggested an little idea to download all subs from a language in another thread, like this :
- English (all subs) <- check here
- English
- English forced narrative
etc.
If you detect an english sub you create an extra checkbox "English (all subs)" and it will download all english subs that the software will find in the video.

 

[DeepSpace]

you create an extra checkbox "English (all subs)"

However, I think that will clutter the UI with multiple entrys.

-English (all subs)
-English
-English cc
-German (all subs)
-German
-German cc
...

With the idea I had above (checkboxes in settings), you end up with the same download dialog as we have now, but using these checkboxes you can tell AS to also download them whenever it sees them. They work in the background and override the standard setting (where the forced sub gets ignored), no additional UI and no mess of entries.
Of course the devs could just add it to the AS algorithm, but that way everyone can choose and adjust the download to his needs.