Foreign DVD rips do not select an audio track

[smr888]

Hello,

Recently (6 months?) I have found that Makemkv does not select any audio track on certain (all?) DVDs of foreign films. So for instance, I rip an older Japanese movie which has only one soundtrack in mono Japanese. That soundtrack is not selected by default, and I get a silent movie. I'm trying to get in the habit of checking this each time, but this is certainly a variance from previous Makemkv behavior. Is this a bug, or have I accidentally configured something incorrectly, or . . . ?

[Woodstock]

Make sure you do not have it set to select ONLY your preferred language by default. While some (not all!) movies will have an English track, for example, not all do.

And the track might be mis-labeled as far as the language is concerned, so you might chose to always rip language X, a track in language X might not have X as the track language. I have cases where Japanese tracks can be labeled as "Japaneses", "English", or not have a language name present. And other (mostly Malaysian) disks were all languages are tagged as "Chinese", even when they are a mix of languages.

Most often, it's in your selection string that the language is chosen. And the select string is not something most people change, but it can be.

[smr888]

Hmmm yes that might be it. In preferences I have "Preferred language : eng : English". I may have thought it was the right thing to do to set that at some point, then forgot about it. Next time I have a DVD that is susceptible to testing I'll try playing around with these settings and see where I get. Thanks for your help.

[smr888]

Just to follow up . . . thanks again, @Woodstock. While ripping another foreign DVD I removed the Preferred Language, and indeed all the language tracks were selected.

Paranoia is probably going to cause me to continue the habit of checking, but at least the problem appears to be resolved. Thanks again.

I guess I could comment in closing, the presence of a Preferred Language really should not cause NONE of them to be selected if that language isn't there. Under what circumstances would a movie with no soundtrack ever be preferable? Seems like a design choice that could stand a rethink.

[Giraffaraptor]

Can we get a "hasfavlang" token? In the event there are only foreign language tracks, would "+sel:(!hasfavlang)" towards the end ensure something gets selected?