Difficulties Switching Between Video/Audio Tracks

[Heralthor]

I have some mkv files with multiple video and audio tracks (2 and 3, respectively), and VLC seems to have some trouble handling them.

First, in the past, if I selected the second video track while the first one was playing, the second track would open up in a separate window so that I could watch both tracks simultaneously. Now it's switching between the two tracks in the main window, so I can only watch one at a time.

Second, when switching tracks (either video or audio), it's always a toss-up as to whether the new track will play successfully. Sometimes it won't play at all (I'll get silence or a blank or frozen video image), and sometimes I have to scrub a bit before the video/audio starts playing. (I thought it might be a buffering issue, but my File Caching is set to 10000 ms.)

Is there a way to improve VLC's performance in playing these types of files? If not, is there another media player that might handle these files better? For reference, I'm running VLC 3.0.18 via Flatpak on Ubuntu 22.04.

Thanks in advance to the community for their help!

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

In the past, VLC would play all video tracks, to much user annoyance. Now it depends what the file actually specifies.

If you're asking to remove that feature, and go back to the buggy behaviour that ain't going to happen. That would be a problem with the encoder, not with VLC.

[Heralthor]

Now it depends what the file actually specifies.

Thank you, but what do you mean by "what the file actually specifies"? Is there something in the encoding that indicates whether both tracks should be played together?

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Depends on the file format, but yes

[Heralthor]

Depends on the file format, but yes

What might that look like? I've never heard of this before.