The VideoLAN Forums

I've been using VLC to watch MKV files of subtitled shows. In the past I've never had issues with subtitles not showing up correctly. Yesterday I upgrade to Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8 ), and VLC rebuilt its font cache when I first restarted it. Immediately thereafter some (but not all) of my subtitled shows had problems. Instead of showing the actual subtitles, it displayed all the characters as a rectangular box with a letter a inside of it (I have found out upon researching that this font is called Last Resort and is used when the system can't find the correct font). As I said, not all of my shows are affected, but a large portion are. I've tried changing the fonts that VLC uses for subtitles along with changing from freetype2 to dummy and back again. So far I haven't had any luck fixing the issue though. I saved a copy of the log after running one of the files with this problem, as well as taking a snapshot of the messed up subtitles. Hopefully someone has a fix for this though. Thanks in advance for your time and help.

As I wrote on other threads (viewtopic.php?f=12&t=102319), this issue comes from fontconfig library setting problem.

VLC uses freetype renderer module when playing SubRip(srt), and uses libass module when playing SSA/ASS.
Both module use fontconfig library. To be exact, from 2.0.2, freetype renderer module doesn't use fontconfig.

This issue happens because fontconfig library installaiton on VLC for Mac.
fontconfig library is used for choosing font from system, and by default on Mac, it searches from only /System/Library/Fonts.
I fixed this behavior (add font search path /Library/Fonts and ~/Library/Fonts) only for freetype but not for libass.

At the moment, you can do:
- Use the fonts in the /System/Library/Fonts.
- Copy the fonts to /System/Library/Fonts.
- Wait for fixing this issue:-)

And I forgot one more option.
- Prepare fonts.conf in /usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts. (maybe this directory doesn't exist, so you have to mkdir.)

Thanks. Copying the font over to /System/Library/Fonts solved the problem.