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Comment by camyule | Hacker News Reader

Seems as relevant a place as any to highlight the lack of support for subtitles in BBC iPlayer on AppleTV: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/help/questions/accessibility/a....

I work in a related industry so fully understand how these situations come to pass, but as a user it’s frustrating to say the least.

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Is it only Apple TV (and not on iPhone for example)? If it's Apple-wide I can imagine it but I'm curious what is the possible reason that BBC can't support having a separate subtitle renderer?

I just checked, iPad has it (and using colour coding, as that has come up elsewhere in these threads). On Apple TV a subtitle menu appears in the time bar, but it doesn't seem to do anything in either the "Automatic" or "CC" options it gives?

CC is a bit of an Americanism, perhaps it is running more directly though some Apple playback code that is more particular about subtitle formats?

I suspect the ultimate case is probably low usage statistics not making it a priority. The icon / BBC logo didn't update at the same time as the iOS version, so I suspect its a separate codebase for some reason?

iPlayer on TV (across all platforms) is a generic web application, topped with a custom wrapper app (think webview) for each platform, responsible to hook platform’s native APIs to Web/JS APIs.

I’m guessing there are some complications hooking Apple TV’s native subtitles APIs to relevant web APIs, and low usage statistics doesn’t help prioritising fixing the issue. Although the rumour is that they are working on a completely new Apple TV app.

For most platforms this is true, but not Apple TV. I don't think they even allow it. iPlayer is definitely native code.

I think Apple must allow it, either that or Google have tried really hard to capture in native code the "shitty non-native web app" feel with the YouTube app. But the iPlayer app does feel fairly native.

Apple TV and AirPlay doesn't support "out-of-band" of subtitles into playback or the use of a separate subtitle renderer, the subtitles have to be linked in the HLS manifest. For a lot of OTT platforms, subtitles are processed and handled separately from AV media, so this is difficult to fix. Some platforms work around this by doing manifest manipulation either server or device side, both have pitfalls.

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