Option for quick on/off subtitles on Apple TV

Suggestions
1

Any chance we get quick on/off of subs for tvOS? I upgraded just now but do not see anything.

6 Likes
2

really want this on tvOS … in fact what I really want is the option in the subtitles to not display forced subtitles … but I understand that the dev team don’t understand the need of it

3

You mean other than in the settings > playback > subtitles where you can choose On, Forced Only, or Off?

4

Yes, I would like an extra option there “ignore forced subtitles”

e.g.
I’m looking a movie with English track don’t display English forced subtitles like it is today
I’m looking a French movie display the English subtitles (not the forced one)

5

I would recommend to create a new suggestion thread for this

6

the suggestion is there: Subtitles "only with foreign audio" option - #29 by mamedc34 since a while … but here is to do a quick on/off … that will work too … on tvOS

7

Moving this to its own thread for now.

Honestly, I’m not sure what this would look like on tvOS as the option is already relatively easy to access and does not interrupt playback (unlike previous iOS versions).

8

I see it like the AppleTV+ application, on the bottom right…

9

Apple TV, for a while, has supported a really cool feature where if you pause and ask Siri “What did they say?” if will rewind 5 seconds, turn on subtitles, play, and then turn subtitles off after 5 seconds.

I find myself needing to do the same thing manually probably on average 10 times while I watch a movie on my Apple TV – and it’s really quite a pain to go through the whole process to turn subtitles on/off via:

  1. Swipe down to bring up options
  2. Swipe over 3 times to subtitles tab
  3. Navigate down to select subtitle track
  4. Click to select
  5. Swipe up to hide options
  6. Play

And then to repeat the whole ten-plus-clicks/swipes process again just to turn subtitles off since I don’t want to see them all of the time.

There was a previous discussion around this, and I understand that Infuse doesn’t support Apple TV Siri commands because it’s probably complicated, and there were some improvements made to iOS (but not Apple TV? unsure):

But I would find it incredibly helpful if there were a way to either toggle subtitles with a single click, and/or have a manual “What did they say” button, on the Apple TV.

Since there’s no obvious button to use on the Apple TV remote, could I suggest:

  1. Press pause button on Apple TV remote
  2. Swipe up to reveal one or more “quick buttons” directly above the timeline (as opposed to the swipe-down that reveals info and tabs)
  3. Then the first button could be “what did they say”, and the second could be “toggle subtitles”. The first button would do the entire rewind/subtitles-on/play/subtitles-off-after-10s, while the second button would just toggle (but not play).

Of course there’s the question of which subtitle track to toggle on/off when there are many, but I think that would be easy enough to solve by just defaulting to the first one, and then allowing the user to switch to a different one (in the existing subtitles tab) and remembering to always use the last-used subtitle track for toggling.

And of course, options for a one-click/keypress quick toggle and what-did-they-say on iOS and Mac, but those are already a bit easier to use than on Apple TV.

Thanks!

10

@NC_Bullseye thanks for merging my suggestion into this thread, this one makes sense.

I’d just like to specifically reply to @James who said

I’m not sure what this would look like on tvOS as the option is already relatively easy to access

And I hope that my description above shows it’s not that easy at all to access, and that perhaps my suggestion of “quick buttons” right above the timeline would be useful.

Thanks again!