Validating audio and subtitle track availability in collections

Archiving a full set of episodes of a TV-series has some challenges: missing episodes, bad quality, recording issues - and language and subtitles. You may have missed one episode on your preferred HDTV channel and got one in SD lacking subtitles and original language.

Below script (yes, I know it's ugly) will dump language information for audio tracks and subtitle tracks from a MKV file in a sorted order. This allows a quick and easy check if your archived episodes have all the same language information.

#!/usr/bin/perl

while (<>) {

last unless /\S/;

$lines .= $_;

}

@tracks = split /A track/, $lines;

@audiotracks = grep/type: audio/, @tracks;

@subtracks = grep /type: subtitles/, @tracks;

foreach (@audiotracks) {

push(@atracks, $1) if / Language: (\w{3})/;

}

foreach (@subtracks) {

push(@stracks, $1) if / Language: (\w{3})/;

}

print "Audiotracks:\t";

foreach (sort(@atracks)) {

print "$_ ";

}

print "\n";

print "Subtitles:\t";

foreach (sort(@stracks)) {

print "$_ ";

}

print "\n";

Save this file as /usr/bin/mkvinfo.pl and make it executable. Move to the folder holding the archived MKV recordings and use a simple wrapper script:

for i in *.mkv; do
        echo "Checking $i"
        mkvinfo "$i" | /usr/bin/mkvinfo.pl
done 

As result you will get a list of filenames (your mkv files) and indented a list of audio and subtitles tracks. By visual comparison you can easily spot a missing track and re-record that episode with a Record task in MythTV.