MGM DVDs subtitle problem

[bencooper]

Hello,

VLC has been my standard video player for a couple of years now. I use it for video files of all kinds, where it has always worked perfectly. And I use it for DVD playback, where admittedly, there are the occasional hiccoughs:
For instance, for some reason VLC forgets to pre-load (I'm guessing) the image stream at the beginning of DVD playback, resulting in a short delay 4-10 seconds into a movie, which makes the image and sound jump at that point. This happens everytime, but if I go back immediately to the very beginning of the film and have it play again, the problem doesn't occur (my guess being that the image stream is properly loaded by then).
Some DVDs VLC doesn't play at all (disc 2 of the R1 ROBOCOP Collector's Edition, for example), but that may be a problem with my drive and/or a form of copy protection or region encoding that my computer can't handle. Other programs won't play that DVD (or the R1 Special Collector's Edition of HONDO) either.
Also, some R1 TV box sets don't play properly with VLC (BUFFY and BOSTON LEGAL for instance), with very short jumps in the sound every 15 minutes or so that are a tad annoying, but ignorable (and they don't manifest on my stand-alone). The cause for that may very well be the same as for ROBOCOP, since none of my drives are natively R1 and I have to rely on DVD Region Killer, which isn't updated anymore and hence not up-to-date. (And at least for BUFFY, the problem persists with other software players as well, so I can hardly blame VLC for that.)

Now, however, I have encountered a fairly weird problem that is a little more bothersome, and rather puzzling: for some recently purchased DVDs, VLC refuses to display subtitles. They are definitely there -- neither my stand-alone player nor Media Player Classic have any qualms about displaying them. What's weird about that is that every single one of the offending DVDs was released by MGM. They're all European discs, with English, German, and some other language tracks and subtitles:

- Comes A Horseman (R2, cover copyright 2005)
- The Indian Fighter (R2, cover copyright 2005)
- Invitation to a Gunfighter (R2, cover copyright 2005)
- The Russia House (R2, cover copyright 2006)

These four aren't the only MGM discs I own, but they're the only ones where I've noticed the lack of subtitles. I haven't checked all of the remaining ones, but at least THE DEVIL'S BRIGADE, with the exact same Western European language options as the others, works fine.

Now, I've read that VLC doesn't support Closed Captions. This could explain my problem, but all of these DVDs are PAL-encoded, and unless I'm mistaken, CC isn't really an option for PAL discs. I like subtitles, I speak a couple of languages and like playing around with them, which works a lot better on the computer than it does using my stand-alone hooked to the TV. So I guess my question is: Does anyone else have my problem? Is it a known bug with VLC and people are trying to fix it, or is it already easily fixable by altering some settings? Or did I maybe just have bad luck and receive a bunch of DVDs with faulty subtitle coding?