The VideoLAN Forums

So, I've been over a LOT of this forum, and while many people have my issue, I haven't found a satisfactory way to fix it yet. The problem is that VLC cannot play about 50% of .mkv files on Mac OS X. The audio works fine, but the video is all greyed out and VLC eventually "quits unexpectedly" after a few seconds of playback. I haven't found a consistent way to determine WHAT exactly is causing this problem. At first, I thought it was the avc1 codec, but I've got a few movies that are avc1 that play fine. However, all the movies that DON'T play are encoded with avc1.

So, I've installed a bunch of other media players and whatnot (at one point I had seven different media players, trying to fix this issue). Perian was by far the best, except for one glaring issue: subtitles. If there are subtitles either encoded into the .mkv itself or in a separate folder, Perian will turn them on and there is no way to turn them off, no matter what options you check in Perian. Subtitles are eye-magnets. I don't like them unless I'm watching a foreign film where they are required. When I'm watching a movie in English, I'd very much like to not have subtitles.

I've long since rid myself of the other media players. Some of them had no audio, some of them had choppy playback, all sucked. I don't even remember all of their names.

So, my choice has become watch the movie in Quicktime with Perian with subtitles, or don't watch the movie at all. WHY won't many .mkv files work with VLC? Why am I getting this grey screen? Why do some avc1 movies work, and others don't? What is the best workaround for this, where I can both watch my movie and not have to deal with subtitles? Thanks!

For me the only mkvs that don't play are the newer 10 bit encoded ones. VLC 1.2 will be adding that feature. Otherwise they play for me.

With Perian in QuickTime Player 7 Pro, you can open Window -> Show Move Properties (Command-J) and deselect the subtitle tracks so they don't appear.

I might have found a solution for the .mkv-files.
The problem I had was that a lot of the times a .mkv-file made vlc-player hang before even opening the file, this is a workaround:
open vlc-mediaplayer
go to taskmanager
in processes right-click on vlc
change affinity to a single processsor
now you should be able to open the file without problems and you can change the affinity back to normal after you opened the file.
This works for me, I hope it works for you too.

EDIT: this is for windows 7, I don't know how to change the affinity for MAC OS

If those using OS X Lion and want to play everything plus the 10p MKV's get the nightly builds, i use the vlc-git-intel64 version. You have to quit the program after each video to play a new one, but once it will play them.
http://nightlies.videolan.org/build/mac ... l/?C=M;O=D