MULTILINGUAL RECORDING MEDIUM AND REPRODUCTION APPARATUS WITH AUTOMATIC SELECTION OF SUBTITLES AND LANGUAGES BASED ON FREQUENCY OF SELECTIONS

A reproduction apparatus is designed to select and decode speech and subtitles (characters) in a given language from a disk on which various types of information are recorded in different languages. This system arrangement makes it possible to standardize the manufacture of disks and reproduction apparatuses world-wide, resulting in a reduction in production cost. In a disk 100, various types of information are recorded in different languages along with video information. A reproduction apparatus selects information in a given language from the reproduced information using a data string processing section 203, a system control section 204, and an operator section 205, and supplies the selected pieces of information to each of a video processing section 206, a subtitle decoder 211, and an audio processing section 213.