[AgentME]

Even for English speakers, the subtitle experience with pirated movies is often lacking. Movies with non-English-speaking characters are often meant to have subtitles for their dialog and not for English speakers by default, but many pirated versions don't do this. I recently saw discussions online of a lot of people saying they went an embarrassingly long time without knowing there were supposed to be subtitles for the aliens in District 9 or the mute hand-signing girl in The Boys.

[marysol5]

Lots of systems like Jellyfin/Emby/Plex etc will pull subtitles from a online repo. And yeah, exactly what you say will happen a lot of the time, and it's near imposable to work out which ones are correct.

I watched an English language TV show, that had a load of German in it. And I got subs for all the English, nothing from the German, then I switched to another source, then it had the inverse, which was great. But what if I wanted subs for the whole thing?

I think one even had the German words, in German....

[account42]

> I think one even had the German words, in German....

Which is great if you are learning the language but not yet proficient enough to understand fast speech.

[anthonj]

That's considered a feature in the community. Burning subs on the video trace is considered bad, but most video player will not automatically show any subtitle track.

[AgentME]

Are there standards for a video to declare a default subtitle track to use?

[anthonj]

Oh looks like there is. mkv does and looks like mpv and vlc will respect that flag. For other formats I'm not so sure