BUG? Language codes for English streams not correctly set

[dcleys]

Today I ripped my Robots dvd. I ripped the main movie, with two audio streams (Dutch and English) and two subtitle streams (Dutch and English). I named each stream with a proper name ("English Dolby Digital 5.1" and "Vlaams Dolby Digital 5.1" for the audio streams and "Nederlands" and "English" for the subtitle tracks). I also made sure the language code for each stream was correctly set to "eng" for the English streams and to "dut" for the Dutch streams. However, it seems the language code for the English streams is not saved in the output mkv file.

When I play the mkv file in XBMC and I want to change the subtitle track, it correctly displays "Nederlands [Dutch]", but for the English subtitle stream, XBMC only displays "English" instead of "English [English]".

So, to find out what was going on, I opened the mkv file in Makemkv itself, where I noticed that the language code for the English audio and subtitle streams was not set at all.

What is causing this and why?

Thanks for looking!

[Romansh]

As per the MKV specification, when the language is not set, it means the language is English. MakeMKV's output is perfectly valid; mkvmerge does this too.

It's XBMC's fault; other applications (e.g. VLC, MediaInfo, recent versions of libavformat) correctly indicate the language as "English" when the language is not set in the MKV file.

[paulster]

If it bothers you just use the MKVtoolnix header editor to enable the language flag again afterwards. It only takes a moment and doesn't require re-muxing.

Lots of tools choose to omit it when it's English as that's a specified default in the MKV format, as has already been stated.