GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 629283
allow selecting an audio file to play with the video
Last modified: 2017-05-08 13:27:52 UTC
Just like you can select an external subtitle file, I would like being able to select an external audio file in the Audio menu. This is useful is some situations where audio for various languages or for various channel configurations (ex: stereo vs 5.1) is provided in different files.
What's the actual use case here? Where do you get those external sound files, and for which type of videos?
Well, although many files come with multiple audio streams muxed into a matroska container, it sometimes happens that you encounters files that have multiple optional tracks, such as a commentary track or 5.1 track instead of stereo, and that these tracks are distributed separately. Granted, this is a rare use case, but I thought that it could be a nice feature to have (one menu item) to complement being able to load external subtitle files. It's just that I don't want to use mplayer or vlc when I could use Totem :) Besides, it's a pain in the arse to do in vlc. You have to first launch it with a command such as vlc "foo.mp4" :input-slave="bar.aac" And then in the ui, go into the Audio menu and manually activate the 2nd audio track (or guess which one it is).
Sorry to be a pain, but I'll close this as WONTFIX. You're the first person to request this in nearly 10 years of Totem, and I don't see an easy way to implement this in Totem. You're probably better off coming up with an application that'll take the video and audio files, and stream them on the local system so you could just point totem at it.
Back then I reported it thinking "well, we have something similar for subtitles. Maybe the same could be done for audio", but fair enough, I understand that this is an edge case here :)
It's an actual problem for me. In my opinion it's really important to fix because a lot of films are downloaded with soundtracks as external files
(In reply to Pavel Shlyak from comment #5) > It's an actual problem for me. In my opinion it's really important to fix > because a lot of films are downloaded with soundtracks as external files I've never *ever* seen that actually. Most videos nowadays would have different tracks within the same file. We do support that. (2nd person in 15 years!)
I'm 3rd :) Now there is no rly good GTK based videoplayer with external audio file support in GNU/Linux (gnome-mplayer have some bugs for a long time). Now only decision for me to use mplayer or mpv with commandline parameters. Actually i know a lot of people that use external audio files (not sure about totem and linux). Would be nice to see this feature in totem someday.