Are forced subtitles broken in iOS 9.3 / OS X 10.11.4?

Question

tim1961 OP

Created Mar ’16

Replies 5

Boosts 0

Views 1.8k

Participants 5

In iOS 9.3 and OS X 10.11.4, the behavior of forced subtitles in AVPlayer appears broken. During playback of a video having forced subtitles, the AVPlayer property appliesMediaSelectionCriteriaAutomatically is YES but calling AVPlayerItem's selectMediaOptionAutomaticallyInMediaSelectionGroup has no effect while it worked as expected prior to the latest OS releases. Likewise, the "Auto (Recommended)" option in the video players (QuickTime Player, Safari) has no effect.

When subtitles and/or closed captions are present in a video, QuickTime Player and the Safari video player present a CC menu which includes an "Auto (Recommended)" option. When "Auto (Recommended)" is selected, and the CC Accessibility options in the system settings are off, AVPlayer is supposed to display forced subtitles if forced subtitles are available for the current language system preference. This behavior is documented in the "Advice about subtitles" section of the AV Foundation Release Notes for iOS 5. This behavior can be seen by playing Apple's bipbop_16x9_variant.m3u8 on iOS prior to 9.3 and OS X prior to 10.11.4.

Am I missing a new system preference which hides forced subtitles, or is this behavior broken in iOS 9.3 / OS X 10.11.4?

BipBop:

https://devimages.apple.com.edgekey.net/streaming/examples/bipbop_16x9/bipbop_16x9_variant.m3u8

AV Foundation Release Notes for iOS 5:

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/releasenotes/AudioVideo/RN-AVFoundation/index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40010717-CH1-DontLinkElementID_3

Boost

Answer 1

DavidLiu OP

Jul ’16

Hi Tim,

I'm have the same issue here. Through my tests, forced subtitles only works on iOS 7. Did you get the issue resolved?

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Answer 2

DavidLiu OP

Jul ’16

For me, I had the go through subtitles in AVMediaSelectionGroup find if it a forced subtile, and selected it manually.

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Answer 3

NeoSylvain OP

Feb ’17

Same here.

Forced display seems not possible natively in Safari iOS nor Quicktime Player.

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Answer 4

Media Engineer OP

Apple

Feb ’17

There seem to be two things going on here.

(1) The sample you reference is incorrect. The forced subtitles are not marked as AUTOSELECT=YES. If you make a copy of the master playlist and fix the AUTOSELECT values, you will find it works correctly in QuickTime Player.

(2) It appears that Safari (or WebKit) is not doing it right even with a fixed playlist.

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Answer 5

henrique OP

Nov ’23

Bumping this one up due to the lack of official docs. What's the behavior for Auto (Recommended)?

Feedback created: FB13344652.

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