Subtitle / Closed caption support in Android

Question

I'm developing an Android app which includes a video component; I'm hoping to provide support for subtitles encoded into the stream but I can't find any references to whether they are supported natively within the Android media player. Does anyone here have any experience with this situation?

Loquacious

It may be helpful to specify the format of the video and subtitle files which you are handling. – Kyleekylen

Indeed! I'm open to suggestion to be honest, as I have some control over what format I'd be using, but ideally it'd be M4V/MP4. I was under the impression that soft subtitles could be encoded into the file/stream so no subtitle files as such, but I'm not a video expert so that could be well wide of the mark! – Loquacious

Answer 1

Android 4.0.x version and below

In case of Android 4.0 version and below, default Media Player did not support subtitles.

It can be done at application layer (using java code) or using native NDK. More details at this white paper on how to support subtitles in Android

Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean - JB)) Onwards

Android JB version has built in support for internal (present in MP4 files) and SRT external subtitles. More details is available at http://developer.android.com/about/versions/android-4.1.html#Multimedia

Somatology