The VideoLAN Forums

There are some issues with .mkv or Matroska files that the player seems to not be able to handle. Here are a list of problems i am having with VLC media player
1.When playing .mkv files, does not auto translate japanese text (not the icons the english words) into english
2.when playing .mkv files, the subtitles overlap, making them impossible to read
3..mkv playback is choppy, and sometimes completely crashes the player
4.to get decent quality period in music or video i have to boost the priority of VLC to high. Even then it sucks when compared to even windows media player, which also sucks
5.I have to switch the deinterlacing to another option every 5 minutes to prevent a crash but sometimes what doesnt even work

dont get me wrong VLC is an excellent player overall but when it is compared to something like winamp and a good codec pack, it just doesnt match up. Please do something about this because im running out of room to hold extra programs and VLC did everything and then some.

Alright, this has been an issue for awhile so CloudStalker understands. Try a nightly build, me thinks that some improvements were made in the handling of .mkv files.

1.When playing .mkv files, does not auto translate japanese text (not the icons the english words) into english

how should translation work?

I also use VLC media player but I didn’t notice that .mkv playback is choppy.

It isn't MKV issues, the problem is in video codecs that need too much CPU time from VLC decoders and cause lag/choppiness because of that. Most people just warez more H.264 HD MKV material than other HD and that is why people associate problem to MKV.

The latest nighly's (0.9.0) are a great improvement over the 8.6 series.

BUT-
1: The subs are still overlapping.
2: Comments {this is a comment} are not being ignored.

This isn't an MKV specific problem, but a softsub problem, as it also occurs in mp4 and other wrappers that allow softsubs.

This does NOT affect DVDsubs, so I can't see why it's taken so long to solve. Even if you can't solve the overlapping straight away, can't you get it to ignore the comments? Please^_^;

As for h264 files being jittery, that only occurs (occasionally) on HD 720p or higher; at least on my system.

VLC 090 (20080809), Vista64hp, Catalyst 8.7

The latest nighly's (0.9.0) are a great improvement over the 8.6 series.

BUT-
1: The subs are still overlapping.
2: Comments {this is a comment} are not being ignored.

This isn't an MKV specific problem, but a softsub problem, as it also occurs in mp4 and other wrappers that allow softsubs.

This does NOT affect DVDsubs, so I can't see why it's taken so long to solve. Even if you can't solve the overlapping straight away, can't you get it to ignore the comments? Please^_^;

As for h264 files being jittery, that only occurs (occasionally) on HD 720p or higher; at least on my system.

VLC 090 (20080809), Vista64hp, Catalyst 8.7

The subs issues should be fixed for the releases.

This does NOT affect DVDsubs, so I can't see why it's taken so long to solve.

DVD movies use image based subtitles. Most MKV files use text based ASS/SSA subtitles. With DVD subtitles you can just blit the images to screen, so no font rendering issues. With text based subtitles you have to convert text to image before you can blit it to video. That is why text based subtitle formats are always harder to implement properly (rendering text to image ain't trivial).