Patent ID: 7877002

Claim:
A playback apparatus for selecting one among a plurality of text subtitle streams recorded on a recording medium and playing back the selected text subtitle stream together with a moving picture, the playback apparatus comprising: a register set storing therein a plurality of flags which indicate, for each language, whether or not a capability to process a text subtitle stream corresponding to a display method unique to said each language is present; a judging unit operable to judge whether or not the display method unique to said each language corresponding to each text subtitle stream can be processed, by referring to each flag stored in the register set that matches language attributes of each text subtitle stream; and a selecting unit operable to select a text subtitle stream that corresponds to a display method judged to be able to be processed by the judging unit; wherein the plurality of flags are preset in the register set before the recording medium is loaded into the playback apparatus, and wherein: bit positions in a plurality of registers constituting the register set correspond one-to-one with language codes of a plurality of languages; when a bit position among the bit positions is set to a predetermined value, it is indicated that the playback apparatus has a capability to process a display method unique to a language code of a language which corresponds to the bit position; and when the bit position is set to a value other than the predetermined value, it is indicated that the playback apparatus does not have the capability to process the display method unique to the language code of the language which corresponds to the bit position.