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How to remove video/audio streams by language using FFmpeg

· One min read

Setting up

First make sure you have FFmpeg installed. Follow this guide if you haven't already:

https://docs.tdarr.io/blog/how-to-install-ffmpeg

Running the CLI

To remove streams by language using FFmpeg, you first need to gather file data using an application such as FFprobe or MediaInfo. This data can help show the language of each stream.

Check the following guide for gathering data using FFprobe:

https://docs.tdarr.io/blog/how-to-install-ffprobe-and-gather-data-from-a-media-file

The language data is normally kept within the stream tags data, for example:

 {
"tags": {
"language": "eng",
}

}

Once you've determined the index of the streams you need to remove, follow this guide to remove the streams:

https://docs.tdarr.io/blog/how-to-remove-media-file-streams-using-ffmpeg

You can automate this process on your files using the following Tdarr Plugins:

To remove unwanted audio streams by language:

Tdarr_Plugin_MC93_Migz3CleanAudio

To remove unwanted subtitle streams by language:

Tdarr_Plugin_MC93_Migz4CleanSubs

info

Get started using Tdarr transcode automation for free with this link:

https://tdarr.io/download/