The Movie Database Support
Support → API Support
ISO 639-3 Support: Comanche language and others
posted by ElectricTriangleSTAFFMOD on August 8, 2022 at 9:26 PM
As noted in the discussions for the new Prey film, Comanche is not a supported language (despite having appeared in a number of films). The site would do well to migrate to ISO 639-3 from ISO 639-1. Googling, it looks like this was shot down in the past as it would break existing apps, but various workarounds have to be considered (returning ISO 639-1 values/null for old clients, a separate field, ect) as this is really overdue and otherwise exclusionary to a variety of films (mostly from the global south—there's a bunch of Indian films mistagged because of this—but also clearly North America in this case).
Reply by Travis Bell
on August 9, 2022 at 1:30 AM
It would be great to eventually add support for ISO 639-3 one day but ISO 639-2 is baked into just about everything layer and corner of TMDB and would be a massive undertaking to update while having to maintain backwards compatibility for ISO 639-2. It touches almost every object in the DB, object caching, front end caching, and more. Unfortunately, there's just no way we can commit to this any time in the near future. I've already got the next 12 months of work fairly well planned and there's just no room for something like this right now.
Reply by ElectricTriangle
on August 9, 2022 at 1:37 AM
Understandable, but it definitely should be on the radar, even if it's pretty far out. And I'm no programmer, but given that you manually added Cantonese, I think similarly kludging in support for some bigger spoken languages not in ISO 639-2 or otherwise allowing a manual entry (even as a separate tag) might be explored because otherwise it's pretty deficient for a lot of African and Indian films. (And this big Hollywood one, lol)