www.makemkv.com

Does the "enabled" flag in the container do anything at all? Has anyone noticed any effect from it?

It's not listed in ffmpeg -dispositions and it's not listed in mediainfo.

Toggling it on and off has no effect in SMPlayer, VLC or Kodi.

I'm asking because I know there was a "Apex" set-top DVD player many, many years ago that did hide the stream, but that was ~20 years ago and it was the only thing I ever saw that observed it.

If a player is 100% compliant to the Matroska spec, it should handle disabled tracks (enabled = 0) as if they're not present/usable.
But many players ignore the flag completely, others give flags like "forced" and "default" higher priority.


From the spec:

FlagEnabled
Default: 1
"Set to 1 if the track is usable. It is possible to turn a not usable track into a usable track using chapter codecs or control tracks."

But do you know of anything that observes the flag? Your spec quote references the long abandoned Matroska menu system... which I guess is a fair correlation to the the enabled flag