On Apple TV, turning subtitles on silences the audio track entirely.
Customer report
Reported 2025-09-23 via support: enabling subtitles in the tvOS app kills audio. The video keeps playing; the sound does not come back until subtitles are turned off again.
Never reproduced internally, never tracked. Surfaced by the audit behind putdotio/putio-web#954, which swept support conversations for TV problems with no engineering issue.
Why it is plausible
tvOS uses react-native-video's native AVPlayer chrome, so subtitle selection goes through Apple's combined Subtitles/Audio panel. Selecting a text track there can change the selected audio track when the media's track groups are ambiguous — a file with sidecar subtitles and multiple or oddly-labelled audio tracks is the shape most likely to trigger it.
That makes it likely to depend on the specific file, which is probably why it has not been seen internally.
Scope
Acceptance criteria
Related: audio-track and subtitle selection on TV recurs across surfaces — roughly 10 support conversations mention subtitles broken or uncontrollable on a TV, and ~7 mention missing audio-track selection.
On Apple TV, turning subtitles on silences the audio track entirely.
Customer report
Reported 2025-09-23 via support: enabling subtitles in the tvOS app kills audio. The video keeps playing; the sound does not come back until subtitles are turned off again.
Never reproduced internally, never tracked. Surfaced by the audit behind putdotio/putio-web#954, which swept support conversations for TV problems with no engineering issue.
Why it is plausible
tvOS uses
react-native-video's native AVPlayer chrome, so subtitle selection goes through Apple's combined Subtitles/Audio panel. Selecting a text track there can change the selected audio track when the media's track groups are ambiguous — a file with sidecar subtitles and multiple or oddly-labelled audio tracks is the shape most likely to trigger it.That makes it likely to depend on the specific file, which is probably why it has not been seen internally.
Scope
Acceptance criteria
Related: audio-track and subtitle selection on TV recurs across surfaces — roughly 10 support conversations mention subtitles broken or uncontrollable on a TV, and ~7 mention missing audio-track selection.