The VideoLAN Forums

2. Yes, we sabotaged CG 15 not to play in VLC… we will continue to do so to every release after this as possible perhaps.

Why no VLC?
We use softsubs for our releases. VLC can (and will) break softsubs very easily, and also doesn’t preserve subtitle styling. It strips all coding in the {} brackets, and will reveal whatever was in the {} brackets as normal text. Hence, we do not recommend using VLC. If you come to us telling us you were using VLC, we are probably going to ignore you, or at least tell you to quit using it…

(There are also some technical reasons against VLC that’re relevant to them encoder folks.)

We are very sorry to see this, but we can't do anything about it. Except waiting for someone to enhance subtitles support.

And they NEVER tried to ask us or report any problem they had with VLC...
This seem to be a rather strange way of thinking, but well...

VLC subtitle engine is known to be riddled with bugs and other issues. Some of the prominent ones being:
-
- Lack of subtitle location detection (This means that subtitle that are suppose to be showing at the same time overlaps each other)
- Does not correctly escape off {}
- Strips off .ass styling tags

The “exploit” that caused subtitles in CG15 to be unviewable in VLC is because there’s a bug within the subtitle engine in which if a word that is more then or equal to 50 characters is encased in braces, the entire line is not shown on screen.

Other more random bugs exist within the VLC subtitle engine and one of them off my mind is if a subtitle containing Japanese characters overlaps 2 or more English lines, the player would crash. This was observed to happen in one of the earlier episodes of Coyote Ragtime Show.

Considering that translation note tends to contain Japanese character, this is a fairly major issue.

Some of you claim that you like seeing the comments written in between braces, but there are a greater number of people who complains that we are not doing our “job” correctly, and leaving these junks all over the screen.

Some of you claim that you don’t mind seeing unstyled subtitle that overlaps, but there are a greater number of people who come yelling in our IRC channel/forums/etc… demanding that we make the subtitle look correct in VLC.

Plenty of you come screaming at us when an unforeseen bug in the VLC codebase caused the player to crash, calling us assholes among other things.

These and other factors make supporting VLC pretty much impossible and even after explanation, people are still convince that the fault lies at the video/encoder/format rather then the player that is attempting to read the video.

When you say the same thing over and over again, your temper tends to get the better of you when people attempts to challenge what has already been said and explained. Incidentally, that’s how our staff are feeling.

We have addressed these issues to the VLC developers before, but since their emphasis is not on subtitles, pretty much no changed has been done to the source code relating to subtitle rendering.