How to view movie subtitles on a new AppleTV

appletvitunessubtitle

I have an .avi and an .srt for a Mandarin movie. I used HandBrakeCLI to generate a M4V file that I could import into iTunes. In iTunes there is an option to turn the subtitles on and off, which works beautifully.

But when I move over to my AppleTV and select the movie from my computer's library, the subtitles do not show when played. I don't see any option in the AppleTV UI to turn subtitles on/off during movie playback.

All I could find was a setting in the Settings menu to set subtitles to "English" – would this be a global setting? Regardless it had no effect on my movie.

How can I view the subtitles when I watch on my AppleTV?

FYI here is the HandBrakeCLI command I used:

HandBrakeCLI -i /Volumes/Drobo/Movies/Ip\ Man\ The\ Legend\ is\ Born.avi -o /Users/emh/Desktop/movie.m4v --preset="AppleTV" --srt-file /Volumes/Drobo/Movies/Ip\ Man\ The\ Legend\ is\ Born.srt --srt-lang English --srt-default

Best Answer

I'm not sure if this will work in your case, but someone on this forum seems to have had some success in a similar situation by simply changing the file extention from .mp4 to .m4v.

They were also using handbrake.