Random audio and subtitles on Amazon Prime

[dkadioglu]

Hi,

I just stumbled upon your great addon and tried it out right away. I set it up to store audio and aubtitle language per movie and per tv show. However, on a series on Amazon Prime (using the Amazon Prime VOD addon), the audio and subtitle language are changing between episodes. It seems, that the amount and order of the list of audio and subtitle languages differ per episode. Do you have an idea, how your addon could also cope with such random changes?

If you need further info, please ask.
Using Kodi 12.2 on Libreelec.

[rockrider69]

Hello !
I am afraid this is a limit of the current feature "Store preferences per Serie". As you experiences, we store in the index/rank of the audio or subtitle tracks once you have selected them. If more or less tracks from one episode to the other, the ordering could change.At this stage I don't an easy way to fix this...

This Store Preference option was meant, in very specific cases, to override your main prefered rules as defined per language names.

If most of the times you look for a specific audios and or sub tracks, maybe you better disable the "Store preferences options" and rather use the original audio and subtiles menus. These will manage to find the language track by names, even if the ordering has changed between episodes.
Have you tried them ?

[SgtJalau]

Hey!
I originally implemented this feature. As a fallback for indexes the language code / name of the subtitle is used. However, that only occurs if the index is not found. Can you provide an example for what your messy subtitle structure looks like? For example 3 different episodes and their media info, specifically for the subtitles?

[rockrider69]

@SgtJalau thx a lot for looking into this one !

[rockrider69]

@dkadioglu and @SgtJalau

I stumbled on a similar problem myself and found more time to analyze the issue :)

Case : I have 10 episodes of the same TV show, all with 4 sub tracks: 2 Eng (1 full 1 forced), and 2 french (1 full 1 forced).
Episodes 1-6 : order is Fre, Eng, Fre Forced, Eng Forced
Episodes 7-10 : order is Eng, Fre, Eng forced, Fre forced
My stored preference for subs stored at Episode1 are Fre-Trackid2 (ie French forced subs), and all is fine up to Episode6.

Issue : from Episode 7 I suddenly get Eng Forced activated as subs (via track-id2 index)...
The root cause in that we search first by language (Fre) but if finding 2+ subs of the stored language, we default to index hence track-id2.
And obviously get Eng Forced activated ...

@dkadioglu
normally if this would be just the order/number of different audio or subs languages changing between episodes, you should still get the right language activated with the current version of LPM.
So I suspect you also faced multiple tracks of the same language somewhere, creating the issue (ex. Eng full dialog, Eng forced only, Eng SDH, ...). If you can confirm that will help!

I could work on a fix to activate the first track in list when multiple tracks of same language exists and switch to index only if no track found per language at all.
But not sure which is best, priority to language or to index...

Anyway it will not solved most complex cases when ordering is changed and having multiple tracks for the same language (full dialog, SDH, Forced, etc...).
Picking first will just guarantee the language is still correct, but maybe you get SDH instead of Forced or Full.
Going deeper would require much heavier recoding, and here the best option IMO remains to use conditional subs rules ensuring sharp selection logic, unsensitive to tracks ordering.

To both sorry for the long post, and thanks for any feedback !

[SgtJalau]

@rockrider69 Hey, I'd suggest doing the following:
Make it a toggle in settings -> Prefer Language or Track Index.

I would not default to the first track of a language, because if there are for example multiple kinds of subtitles, you might get the one you specifically did not want from that language. Like, you switch away from Eng SDH (hearing impaired) to normal Eng. Now, next episode you get Eng SDH again if it is first in the list.

Maybe we can try to store the plain name of the track and also go by that. Such as Eng SDH and Eng PGS or something. Otherwise if track names change, we can try to extract key information from the title such as PGS, SDH, honorifics, signs & songs type of subtitles and go by that. That is ->
First: Try to get track by exact track name match
Second: Try to get track by identifying match & language (signs & songs, PGS etc.)
Just go by index / language (pick first).

[dkadioglu]

normally if this would be just the order/number of different audio or subs languages changing between episodes, you should still get the right language activated with the current version of LPM.
So I suspect you also faced multiple tracks of the same language somewhere, creating the issue (ex. Eng full dialog, Eng forced only, Eng SDH, ...). If you can confirm that will help!

Yes, I can confirm that. One just tested example is: The Man in the High Castle on Amazon Prime. On the Pilot and the first episode the indices of the languages differ from each other as well as there are multiple entries per language. I tested this with the beta version from branch V1.0.9Beta2.

I just had one spontaneous idea: could maybe Pythons difflib (https://docs.python.org/2/library/difflib.html) be a solution? You could try to use difflib.get_close_matches. What do you think about that?