I have already posted this months ago and I got no answer, so let' me try again. It is a very consistent problem (true on Windows and Linux alike) and pretty mysterious to me, as it has nothing to do with the encoding of special characters nor other usual problems people usually report.
The problem is that very often subtitles (practically always...) do not appear on the screen. ("Very often", because I remember a film, for instance, where the first few minutes show without subtitles, then suddenly everything was perfectly fine--and no, I was not drunk....) This problem is there for some tens of .srf files, which are correctly loaded automatically when the ISO is read, but do not appear. I inspected at least a few of these .srt file and I cannot see any issue--I checked in hex mode for strange char sets (there should be none, as they are in English) and I have in some cases tried to change the encodings and/or the settings in VLC, but without any hope. I used some of the .srt with other media players in Windows and they appear perfectly fine.
Here are some details which may help:
- I just installed VLC 1.1.5 under Windows but the problem was there already in VLC 1.1.1. It is there also on Ubuntu (slightly older version).
- I tried, in one case of a film where they partly show, to add CJK chars and encode in UTF-8, and they still worked 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. Mounting the ISO image (on Windows) and reading them as DVDs does not improve the problem (in this case I need to drag and drop the .srt file on the VLC window and then they appear selected in Video > Subtitles Track).
- I tried as suggested in some other post to switch on the messages with verbosity 2, but I see nothing too scary--although messages are a bit cryptic. Here is what I see when I change to the .srt subtitles
avcodec debug: libavcodec already initialized
avcodec debug: codec not found (Text subtitles with various tags)
subsdec debug: trying configured character encoding: UTF-8
main debug: using decoder module "subsdec"
Does anyone has a clue? If this is a bug, how can I report it? I would be very grateful for some help, as VLC seems the best player around, but when I need the subtitles I am stuck....
Thanks,
p.
