SiliconDust tells me their channel is only responsible for selecting which broadcast stream to pass through to the Roku Media Player. In other words, SiliconDust states they are passing through the broadcast stream completely unmodified and that it is up to the media player to decide what to do with the video and audio programs within that stream. Although I am certainly not an expert in such matters, this seems to make sense to me. If they do indeed pass the broadcast stream through unmodified, it seems unlikely there is any mechanism for them to indicate which audio program to play.
Roku's decision to always play the first audio program (assuming that is indeed what they are doing) should always work perfectly fine if the user wants to listen to the english audio program on an ATSC 1.0 Broadcast. That is, I believe an ATSC 1.0 Broadcast (at least on an english channel) will always have the english audio on the first audio program and the spanish audio on the second audio program.
However, this convention (requirement?) does not hold true for ATSC 3.0 Broadcasts. For whatever reason, spanish audio is the first program on many of the ATSC 3.0 Broadcasts here in Houston. The best and most correct solution would obviously be for the roku media player to identify and play the audio program that matches the current user's default language setting.
Of course, it should also be mentioned that we wouldn't have this issue if the broadcasters simply put the english program first and the spanish program second for their ATSC 3.0 Broadcasts. Is there some technical reason why they are not doing this? At least to me, it seems rather odd they are not already doing this. I am trying to find an engineering contact at my local tv stations to ask this question, but have not had any luck in finding anyone so far.
Does Roku monitor and read these forum posts?
