Multiple audio tracks for the same video (Community Wishlist/W109)

Description

Wikimedia and Wikipedia are known for their multilanguage approach, offering more than 300 language versions. However, when uploading videos, we are still limited to the regular one language per file approach. This have changed a little with SVG translate (which still is not widely used), but video uploading is more difficult. The current approach for dubbing a video is downloading the original video, converting it from .webm to .mp4, dubbing it, converting again to .webm and uploading it, losing quality in every conversion and making the process complex and not appealing.

We could be the first massive service to offer multitrack videos, adding a selector to the videos, where you can choose the language you want to use for the video. This would make video reusing easier, improve underserved languages (as it is easier to upload an audio file than a full video) and would be a very interesting improvement to our ecosystem.

This has also been requested in Commons' Technical needs survey.

Assigned focus area

Unassigned

Type of wish

Feature request

Tags

Multimedia and Commons

Affected users

translators, underserved languages

Other details

Created: 07:29, 29 July 2024
Last updated: 21:11, 9 October 2025
Author: Theklan (talk)

Voting

This wish currently has 2 supporters. Voting for this wish is open until it is completed.

Supporters of this wish

Support there are thousands of living languages; there are over 350 Wikipedias; the conclusion is that it would be best that instead of flooding Commons including Commons categories with many times the same video, it would be best to have a separate audiotrack that can be switched like with modern streaming service where one can switch both the subtitles and the audio language in the video configs instead searching anew. This also allows people speaking other languages but browsing ENWP to switch a video to their language if available. Dubbing videos has been made a lot easier and quicker to do using AI so not long from now some may redub many videos into other languages where this would be very valuable. However, don't embed more than the original language into the video because with more than 3 langs, the video will bloat up to a large size. Basically, when switching audio lang, the original audio would get muted and a separate audio-only stream start in parallel to the video. Prototyperspective (talk) 17:16, 13 October 2025

Support WMPT and WELx recently hosted GLAM Wiki Conference where we offered simulatenous interpertation between Portuguese and English for all presentations in the Auditorium. Without an easy way to include translated audio in Commons I have to duplicate the files and upload them as separately — which creates a lot of extra work. Then, having separate videos also means that metrics and information about reuse is harder to track over time, regarding the same information. Conbene (talk) 13:40, 10 November 2025