ASS styling is not understood by simple players, and it is lost when converting to plain formats. SCC is what broadcasters, DVD authoring tools and video editors accept as closed captions. ASS is at home in anime and karaoke subtitles with fonts, colours and positioning; SCC is the usual choice for closed captions for US and Canadian broadcast, DVD and some streaming deliveries.
The text is read as UTF-8 or UTF-16, whichever the file is. An older file in another code page is read using the charset it declares, or as Windows-1252 if it declares none, so accented letters in an unlabelled legacy file can come out wrong. A file that is not text, such as the picture-based subtitles of a DVD, is refused instead of being converted to nonsense. Of the styling, only italic, bold, underline and the position on screen (top, middle or bottom, left, centre or right) travel between formats; fonts, colours, outlines and effects do not. Each line takes its italic, bold, underline and alignment from its style and from override tags; drawing commands and karaoke effects are ignored. Captions are written as CEA-608 pop-on captions on channel CC1 at 29.97 fps drop-frame: lines are wrapped to 32 characters and at most four rows, characters the standard has no code for become the nearest plain letter or a question mark, and colours are not kept. A caption needs a moment to load, so cues closer together than that are painted on as they are typed or appear a few frames late. Input denser than the channel can carry (a byte pair a frame) loses the captions that could not start within two seconds of their time, and a cue that starts while another is showing cuts that one short.