Disable default subtitle track with ffmpeg

Question

I'm creating an MKV container with 4 different files:

• video.mp4
• audio_en.mp4
• audio_es.mp4
• subtitles.ass

For that I'm using the following ffmpeg script:

ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -i audio_es.mp4 -i audio_en.mp4 -i subtitles.ass 
-map 0:v -map 1:a -map 2:a -map 3:s 
-metadata:s:a:0 language=spa 
-metadata:s:a:1 language=eng 
-metadata:s:s:0 language=spa -disposition:s:0 -default 
-default -c:v copy -c:a copy -c:a copy -c:s copy result.mkv

The result.mkv looks awesome, everything works as expected except for one thing: subtitles are still set as the default track, so players like VLC shows them automatically. I've already tried plenty of different ways to avoid that to happen with the disposition flag but I cannot make it work.

How should I modify the script so that the MKV does not have the subtitles track marked as default?

Thanks in advance!

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65672037/disable-default-subtitle-track-with-ffmpeg

Answer 1

For Matroska (.mkv) output use the -default_mode option:

ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -i audio_es.mp4 -i audio_en.mp4 -i subtitles.ass 
-map 0:v -map 1:a -map 2:a -map 3:s 
-metadata:s:a:0 language=spa 
-metadata:s:a:1 language=eng 
-metadata:s:s:0 language=spa 
-default_mode infer_no_subs 
-c copy result.mkv

This option requires FFmpeg 4.3 or later, or use a build from the current git master branch.