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Please see attached screenshot (from Inception movie). Note the closed captioning / subtitle. It's grey and hard to read. Please see photo below


Below is an example of a subtitle (from Narnia Prince Caspian movie) that is good.


Between the 2, I have not made any changes to the settings/preferences in VLC. Why are subtitles bad in some DVDs and how can I fix this problem?

I use VLC 1.1.9 The Luggage on Linux. I don't know whether this problem is universal or whether it affects only Linux.

Update: I downloaded a subtitles text file from http://subscene.com/english/Inception/s ... 80020.aspx and the subtitles look amazing. Why is it that external subtitles look good but the ones on the DVD look bad?

Well, because external subtitles look always better than DVD ones.

Then, for your grey bug, can you cut a piece of the dvd and upload it?

I'm having a similar problem. VLC version 1.1.11. I'll give all the info because I don't know what might be relevant.

I just recently decided to rip all my dvd collection into my hard drive. However due to size constraints I also decided that I'd rather convert the dvd's to .mp4 rather than keep them just ripped (VIDEO_TS) in my hard drive.

I chose the program "Handbrake" to handle the conversion and I'm very happy with the resulting image quality as well as the final file size. I also use an option it has, to rip the subtitles and include them into the video file (with the option to turn them ON/OFF during playback).

However a problem has come up:

When I use VLC to play these video with the subtitles enabled, the quality of the subtitles is quite bad.

Here is a couple of sample images.

Problem 1:

Green artifacts around the edges of the letters:


Uploaded with ImageShack.us

As you can see this problem does not exist in "Windows Media Player Classic"


Uploaded with ImageShack.us


Problem 2:

The letters seem to be compressed vertically. Seems very clear in the letter "O" which looks more like an egg than a circle.

Again, in "Windows Media Player Classic" the letters seem fine.


What I find rather strange is that VLC handles subtitles in the .srt format quite nicely. It's just these "video included" subtitles that it has problems with.

Is it something that the VLC team has acknowledged and keeps trying to solve or is it just a nuisance that not many users care about so they've overlooked it?

Here's to hoping that they find what causes these problems and fix them in one of the upcoming releases, I really don't want to have to rely on a windows program for playing my movies! What if I decide to switch to Linux?

Giving screenshots without giving the codec and without using the latest version is not useful.

Ok, the codec I used is H.264.

VLC 2.0 seems to fix the problem with the green artifacts but now the letter edges seem more "rough"/pixelated.

Also the problem with the vertical letter squeezing remains.

This is not the subtitle codec.

Well, because external subtitles look always better than DVD ones.

Then, for your grey bug, can you cut a piece of the dvd and upload it?

Jean,

1. How do I cut a piece of the DVD?
2. By the way, when I play the same DVD in another program (Totem Movie Player 2.32.0), the subtitles look OK.

handbrake, I guess.

handbrake, I guess.

Hi, Jean, I have installed Handbrake 0.9.5. How do I implement your advice ("cut a piece of the DVD")?

Hmmm... one DVD movie has ugly subtitles in both VLC and Totem movie player (Where the wild things are)

Jean,
i have Handbrake running. What format should I use: MKV or MP4?

Currently watching a DVD movie with VLC.

I chose "Track 1 - [English]" initially as my "subtitles track". The subtitles looked ugly. I then pressed "v" key to cycle throught the other subtitles. I chose "Closed captions 1" and the subtitles looked great. Wonder why "Track 1 - [English]" looks bad. And wish "Closed captions 1", the track that had the nice subtitles, had "English" in its title, so that I wouldn't have to guess.

http://i.imgur.com/2aDET.jpg

Because DVD subs are images, while CC are text.

Jean,
Playing a DVD in VLC and the subtitles are ugly. When I "cut" a section in Handbrake, the resulting m4v file has a nice subtitle. That is very wierd. How can I show you my problem if Handbrake doesn't reproduce the ugliness?

{green lantern}

hmmm, annoying. No idea.

This big fat blurry grey subs issue (as described by the OP, not whatever funkybomber was posting about which is a different issue entirely) has persisted for years in all versions of VLC since 1.0 was introduced. See here: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=63282

For whatever the reason, it seems to only happen with 'Warner Bros' DVDs (like the OP's 'Inception'). I've seen it in 'He's Just Not That Into You', Sherlock Holmes', 'Book of Eli', 'Magic Mike', 'Clash of the Titans', etc.

For example, here they are in the more recent 'Dark Knight Rises':



A workaround after getting the big fat ugly grey blurred subtitles is to go back to the DVD menu and select the subtitle track again from the menu (not from vlc's 'video' > 'subtitle track' options). Don't ask me why but this works to correct the problem.

Example:

The fact that going through the menu to fix it puzzles me...

Selecting subtitles thru the menu to correct the issue only works after you have already encountered the fat grey blurry subs. It doesn't matter how you originally select the subtitles, either from the menu or through vlc's 'video' > 'subtitle track' options they always will occur the first attempt when trying to play the Eng subs on affected Warner Bros titles, and only after seeing the problem and then going to the menu and selecting the subtitles will it clear the issue up.

It is very strange but this issue and the described workaround has been reported as working by several others in various topics here in vlc's forums incl the one I linked (and many other forums I frequent), and has always worked 100% for me beginning with VLC v1.1.0 on XP and the exact same issue has persisted for me on all VLC versions ever since on XP, Vista, and now Win7.

Others have also reported the exact issue in other OS's such as Linux, incl one such post about it I suspect/hope may help yield a clue as to where the problem lies.

For other folks also running into this problem. The terminal spells it out rather clearly, this is a font-loading issue. Because English seemed to be the only language that was spitting out the ugly gray subtitles.

Terminal told me: "freetype spu text error: failed to load font file DejaVu Sans"

I solved this problem by opening VLC [Tools] > Preferences > Subtitles & OSD > -Display Settings- : Font : [Browse]

With Ubuntu 10.04, and using DejaVu Sans, it's located under:
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf

Hope this helps,