Why do I see an additional "CC1" entry in the subtitle menu in Safari/iOS?

The behaviour can be observed when using the Web SDK or iOS Native SDK in Safari on macOS/iOS. As part of the "automatic media selection feature" on iOS 1, the presence of closed captions and subtitles, or their absence, must be known prior to playback.

Bitmovin Player UI - Subtitle Selection menu

Native Player - Subtitle Selection menu

By default, and unless this is explicit within the Master Playlist, the alternate track button, or "CC" button, will be displayed along with the various other player controls and will be set to the "Unknown CC" option as shown above.

How can I get rid of this entry?

There are two ways of removing this additional selectable subtitle:

1. When creating your HLS master playlist: Set the CLOSED-CAPTION attribute to NONE in the HLS Master Playlist file for all variant streams as described in the HLS specification 2

1#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:PROGRAM-ID=1,CLOSED-CAPTION=NONE,BANDWIDTH=6214307,CODECS="avc1.4d4028,mp4a.40.2",AUDIO="surround",RESOLUTION=1921x818
2video/6000kbit.m3u8

2. Bitmovin Player API v7 - If you know that this caption track is not needed, it is possible remove it from the player directly in the app without modifying the manifest. In this case, removeSubtitle(String trackID) API call can be used as soon as the player discovered this track. You can obtain its trackID with player.getAvailableSubtitles(), or by listening to the 'subtitleadded' event

3. Bitmovin Player API v8 - If you know that this caption track is not needed, it is possible remove it from the player directly in the app without modifying the manifest. In this case, player.subtitles.remove(String trackID) API call can be used as soon as the player discovered this track. You can obtain its trackID with player.subtitles.list(), or by listening to the 'subtitleadded' event

1 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8216#section-4.3.4.2

2 https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/qa/qa1801/_index.html