feat: Add default audio selector

[burikoni]

Pull Request Type

• Bugfix
• Feature Implementation
• Documentation
• Other

Related issue

open #4291

Description

Add an option to set the default audio language

Screenshots

Testing

Select a language and open a video with multiple audio tracks. For example, one of MrBeast’s recent videos.

It was also tested with the Invidious API using a locally hosted server, since the online instances either don’t expose the API or are offline.

Desktop

• OS: GNU/Linux
• OS Version: Linux debian 6.12.95+deb13-amd64
• FreeTube version: v0.25.2 Beta

Additional context

The list of languages and their codes was obtained using the YouTube API through the i18nLanguages.list endpoint, and the values zh-Hans for Simplified Chinese and zh-Hant for Traditional Chinese were added, as indicated in the relevanceLanguage section of search.list.

[github-actions]

This PR is stale because it has been open 14 days with no activity. Remove stale label or comment or this will be closed in 14 days.

[github-actions]

This PR is stale because it has been open 14 days with no activity. Remove stale label or comment or this will be closed in 14 days.

[absidue]

The biggest issue with this pull request is that most people will want to keep using the original audio track on most videos and this pull request overrides it to something else every time. So this would be a breaking change that most people wouldn't want.

[efb4f5ff-1298-471a-8973-3d47447115dc]

Im not sure if the following is a good idea at all but I would personally be more comfortable with following youtube's flow

That would essentially mean the following:
User that watches a video for the first time and hears original audio track -> user changes audio track to e.g. Spanish -> next video, it checks if Spanish audio track is available, if yes then use it, if no use original.

Not sure if this is a good idea either but in addition to that we could store last used one track when you close FreeTube. So when you come back to it, it will try to find Spanish first and then switch to original if it cant find it. When close FreeTube it will store original because thats the last one used

[burikoni]

hi @absidue I understand what you're saying. It's more a matter of preference; for people who aren't fluent in the original language, the alternative audio is preferable.
Ultimately, it's more about convenience, so you don't have to select the language for each video.

@efb4f5ff-1298-471a-8973-3d47447115dc On YouTube, it depends on the account preference; if you have the language set to Spanish, all videos will default to that language (if the track is available).

[absidue]

While it is a matter of preference, the way that the setting is currently implemented is a breaking change that goes against what most FreeTube users probably want, as this pull request always selects a language, it does not provide an option to disable it/use the actual original audio track, which means it is actually an inconvenience for most users as they'll have to manually select the original audio track on every video.
So in its current state this pull request is definitely not mergeable, if it were improved maybe we could consider it.

[burikoni]

While it is a matter of preference, the way that the setting is currently implemented is a breaking change that goes against what most FreeTube users probably want, as this pull request always selects a language, it does not provide an option to disable it/use the actual original audio track, which means it is actually an inconvenience for most users as they'll have to manually select the original audio track on every video. So in its current state this pull request is definitely not mergeable, if it were improved maybe we could consider it.

Thanks for clarifying; I understand the issue you're describing now. Could a "prefer original audio" checkbox be checked by default, such that unchecking it enables the combo box for selecting the alternative audio? That way, it wouldn't break during updates.

[absidue]

The dropdown should contain an entry to use the original audio track (explicitly track not language, as videos can also have audio descriptions in the original language which are not the original audio track), which should be the default value for that setting.

[absidue]

Also reminds me that you should implement the audio track selection yourself instead of relying on shaka-player's preferred languages setting as you also need to ensure that you don't select an audio description or secondary audio track with this new setting and ideally this setting should only pick a different language if it was uploaded by the person that uploaded the video and avoid the AI/machine learning dubs created by YouTube.

[burikoni]

The dropdown should contain an entry to use the original audio track (explicitly track not language, as videos can also have audio descriptions in the original language which are not the original audio track), which should be the default value for that setting.

Why add "original audio" to the dropdown? It would make sense if that option were set as the default instead of using the checkbox.

Also reminds me that you should implement the audio track selection yourself instead of relying on shaka-player's preferred languages setting as you also need to ensure that you don't select an audio description or secondary audio track with this new setting and ideally this setting should only pick a different language if it was uploaded by the person that uploaded the video and avoid the AI/machine learning dubs created by YouTube.

It is established that if the preferred audio isn't available, the original track is used—ignoring "Stable Volume" or "Voice Boost" variants; this would also apply to the descriptive audio track.

I don't understand the need to distinguish between user-uploaded dubbing and AI-generated dubbing. It could be a preference setting to avoid loading AI dubbing, but generally speaking, I don't see why they need to be separated.