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Page: Language not available in MKVToolNix GUI
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1 Language not available in MKVToolNix GUI
Moritz Bunkus edited this page 2020-06-16 19:12:54 +00:00
Table of Contents

Certain languages aren't available in MKVToolNix GUI

TL;DR

The short answer is: you can configure which languages are shown in the preferences → "GUI" → "Often used selections" → "Languages".

Background

MKVToolNix GUI contains several drop-down boxes with tens or even hundreds of entries: languages, countries and character sets. Having to use such long drop-down boxes has real drawbacks: it's much harder to find the entries you're actually looking for, and it's very hard to discover certain entries that you had no idea actually existed.

The full list of languages including certain special items (e.g. "undetermined" or "no linguistic content") is nearly 500 entries long.

Helping the user find things

In order to improve this situation, the GUI can break those lists down into two sections. In the first section, shown at the top, only those entries will be shown the user uses all the time, making it much easier to find them. The second section, which is separated from the first section by a visible separator line, contains all the remaining entries. This enables the user to select entries that they don't usually need, but that they need this one time.

The first section is referred to in the GUI's preferences as "often used selections". As the sentence implies, the list is configurable so that each user can fine-tune the lists to their situation and usage patterns.

There are even options in the preferences, a checkbox on the bottom of the "often used selections" tabs, that instruct the GUI to only shown the first section: just the often used items, but not the full list. This makes the drop-downs even shorter and easier to navigate at the cost of not being able to select options that one hasn't configured in advance.

Defaults for "often used selections"

The GUI will, of course, remember all changes made to these selections by the user. However, for brand new installations the GUI must provide reasonable defaults for each of the three categories (languages, countries and character sets). These defaults will only be applied when the GUI is started and no saved settings can be found. They never replace changes made by the user.

Back in the day the default list of "often used languages" was rather Euro-centric (I'm from Germany) with certain additions from Asia & Northern America. The section section (all remaining languages) was shown by default. Unfortunately users weren't always happy with that choice: sometimes they missed entries in the top sections, other times they complained about a lot of archaic languages still being listed.

In order to improve the defaults I switched things up in release 37.0.0 from 2019-08-24. The new default list of often used languages was derived from Wikipedia's list of languages by native speakers. Additionally the "show only the often used entries" option was turned on by default, meaning the drop-down boxes did not contain all possible entries anymore.

The reasoning was that this would get rid of archaic entries while keeping those languages spoken by the vast majority of people on the planet while still keeping the total number of entries in the drop-down boxes manageable (around 75 entries in total).

Turns out that wasn't a good choice. Since that release I've received plenty of bug reports about languages not being available at all. Users simply didn't know or realize that those lists could be configured in the preferences. And I don't blame them! The GUI doesn't announce that fact prominently anywhere. You have to open the preferences (which many users never do — which is why defaults matter!), then realize that "often used selections" actually means the language drop-down boxes, too.

Therefore the defaults will change again in the upcoming release v48 which is due in July 2020. The new defaults only include the following languages in the "often used languages":

  • the operating system's default user interface language (as this is likely the language the user speaks)
  • English ("eng") as this is the lingua franca of huge parts of the world's population
  • several special entries that aren't actually languages:
    • multiple languages ("mul")
    • no linguistic content ("zxx")
    • reserved for local use ("qaa")
    • uncoded languages ("mis")

Additionally the "show often used only" option is off by default, meaning the drop-down boxes will contain all possible languages again.

What the user has to do when updating to v48

If you want to keep your currently configured list of languages: nothing at all.

If you want to switch to the new defaults: remove all settings whose names start with oftenUsed… from the settings file or just remove the whole settings file itself.

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