Trouble with subtitle-embedded .mkv files

[wesley]

I've got several .mkv files with embedded subtitles, but none of them seem to show the subtitles properly. They come out looking broken and have an error box popping up with messages like

main: picture 0x31cd44c refcount is -1

although the hexadecimal number varies. I checked the type of subtitle with Info dialog box and they aren't of a single type: some are ssa, some are subt, etc.

This has been observed in the PPC and Intel builds of VLC... I think this happened in 0.8.4 as well as the current test / nightly builds of 0.8.5. I wonder if there is any feasible workaround to this?