The VideoLAN Forums

I frequently load domestic videos that include subtitle tracks. But I do not want to automatically play any subtitles.

Please provide an option to disable subtitles by default, matching the same behavior as many other video applications.

The option already exists and it defaults to disabling subtitles.

That's not the behavior I'm seeing on macOS.

Every single .MKV that includes a subtitle stream is showing them by default.

Worse, my preference to disable the stream doesn't even persist across VLC app relaunches.

The app remembers the scrobbling location but resets subtitles back on.

The problem is probably amplified by MKV's ability to declare default subtitle tracks per video file. At the end of the day, VLC has dropped multiple balls on this issue.

For comparison, Plex does a much better job implementing intuitive subtitle behavior. For most videos, I only want to see subtitles when the audio channel is not my native language, or when I manually elect to enable that video's subtitles.