Subtitles visible only sometimes

[ienne]

Hello.

I have very weird problems with subtitles in .srt format, and I tried to understand the problem but failed. Could not find trace on the forum of anyone else with the same problems.

The problem is that very often subtitles do not appear on the screen. "Very often", because sometimes they do! I have a film, for instance, where the first few minutes show without subtitles, then suddenly everything is perfectly fine. I inspected the .srt file and I cannot see any issue (not even looking in hex mode for weird chars)--specifically no change in format between the last not shown subtitle and the first one which does. I am absolutely no expert with video and subtitle formats, but I am reasonably knowledgeable of software systems, and I cannot make any sense of what happens.... My understanding of the .srt format suggests that the subtitles are fine.

Here are some details which may help:
- I am running VLC 1.1.1 but I am almost certain the problem was there before--I simply did not bother to try.
- I am running mostly Windows, but the problem is there also in Ubuntu Linux (slightly older VLC).
- Subtitles are in English, downloaded from the web, apparently in iso-latin-1 or other standard ASCII, with CR+LF. I tried in one case to add CJK chars and encode in UTF-8, and they still work fine for part of the film (including the CJK chars which show as a box--but this is a font problem and I do not care).
- The movies are ISO files. I also tried to mount the images and read them as from a DVD. I think there is no problem there.
- The subtitle files are clearly well detected automatically but I also manually loaded, drag&dropped them, etc.--I tried all ways, new subtitles appear in Video > Subtitles Track so there is no problem there either (besides, as said, sometimes the subtitles work fine).

Does anyone has a clue?

Thanks,

p.

[ienne]

Small follow up: I have installed Media Player Classic Home Cinema 1.3.1249.0 and the subtitles work perfectly, confirming my impression that there is absolutely nothing wrong with them. Unfortunately, MPC HC does not seem to support reading ISO images directly (it somehow does, but I get no audio and a wrong aspect ratio), so I need to mount the image first, which is a little annoying--but then it is perfect. I guess it is a weird VLC bug, then.

p.