Mac – Subtitles not displaying correctly in VLC

macsubtitlesvlc-media-player

VLC player is not showing subtitles correctly. It's just showing capital "A"s in place of the correct text. Please check the screenshot attached to this post.

Do I need to install a missing font? How can I fix it?

Can I export .srt file from the subs embeded into this mkv file?

enter image description here

Best Answer

I have had that happen with several different .ass subtitles. For example subtitles with the Plain with border style were not displayed correctly in these subtitles:

[V4+ Styles]

Format: Name, Fontname, Fontsize, PrimaryColour, SecondaryColour, OutlineColour, BackColour, Bold, Italic, Underline, StrikeOut, ScaleX, ScaleY, Spacing, Angle, BorderStyle, Outline, Shadow, Alignment, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Encoding
Style: Default,Trebuchet MS,40,&H00E6F4FC,&H000000FF,&H00000000,&H00000000,-1,0,0,0,100,100,0,0,1,1,1,2,10,10,10,1
Style: Plain with border,Arial,30,&H00000000,&H000000FF,&H00FFFFFF,&H00000000,0,0,0,0,100,100,0,0,1,2,0,5,10,10,10,1

It was fixed by changing the bold attribute from 0 to -1 or just deleting the styles completely. MPlayerX has also displayed those subtitles correctly.

You can extract subtitles from mkv files with mkvextract:

brew install mkvtoolnix
mkvextract tracks video.mkv -c UTF-8 3:subs.srt

Another common issue is that VLC shows characters that are not included in the default subtitle font as rectangles. It can be fixed by just changing the default font. You can also change the text rendering module to CoreText font renderer, but it makes text look too thin in my opinion.

Related Solutions

Problem with subtitles(.srt) on DVD player

I don't own your DVD player, but I too have problems with subtitles on my DVD player (a modest AG). It works if I convert the subtitles to a SUB format. MicroDVD on my case.

Since you don't want to mux the subtitles, you have very few options. There's nothing wrong with your srt. This is controlled by your dvd player chipset. Either srt is entirely not supported, or the chipset contains a bug (unfortunately common on many asian-made models). Some hardcore ripping folks on the net know all the details on many of these chipsets. So you may want to open your dvd player, get the chipset make and model and travel to such places like Doom9, for further info.

Finally, if your DVD player is DivX Certified, you can convert your srt to XSUB. It won't matter if you then mux or not. It will play in that format.

Best of luck.

To be clear, there's nothing you can do other than trying to convert your srt to other formats or mux the subtitles.

But since you seem interested in playing ripped videos in your DVD player, let me give you a piece of advise: As soon as possible get yourself a DivX Certified DVD player. There's much better subtitle support on these devices.

Ffmpeg copy attached fonts to be used by .ass subtitles

First, you actually can copy fonts with ffmpeg. The -map option overrides some defaults and selects all streams from the input. Example:

ffmpeg -i infile.mkv -map 0 -c copy outfile.mkv

Also see the FFmpeg Map documentation for more info.

For attaching fonts to an existing video, the -metadata:s:2 option is indeed selecting stream 2, but if you look at your mkvinfo output you'll see that attachments are their own stream. They are not "attached" to the subtitle stream. So in the example in your question you would want -metadata:s:3. And additional attachments should use corresponding stream specifiers.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Problem with subtitles(.srt) on DVD player

Ffmpeg copy attached fonts to be used by .ass subtitles

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