SMI is HTML-like and many players outside Windows and Korea do not read it. MCC is accepted by broadcast delivery specifications and caption tools that need frame-accurate caption packets. SMI is at home in subtitles for Korean-market players and multilingual files; MCC is the usual choice for closed captions for broadcast and streaming delivery that carry CEA-708 as well as CEA-608.
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. A SAMI file can hold several languages; only the first one found is read. The captions are the same CEA-608 pop-on data as an SCC file, wrapped in one caption packet per frame that carries data. Idle frames get no line, which keeps the file small, and there is no CEA-708 data.