Random ugly fat gray illegible subtitles (Pride and Glory)

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

If you just launch the movie, but activate the subtitles in the VLC subtitle menu, without going in the DVD menu to select subtiltes, does it work?

[DVR]

Here is the fix for blurry, gray subtitles in VLC. Go to Tools/preferences and check "All" radio button in left bottom corner. Click on the arraow at the left side of "Input/Codecs" menu to make "Subtitle Codec" visible. Click on the arrow at the left of "Subtitle Codecs". Click on "VBI & Teletext". In the right side pane check "Opacity". Click "Save" button in bottom of pane. Restart VLC

[dottore73]

thanks to all who have struggled with this problem and for the many helpful posts.

I see the same problem with VLC 3.0.14 on MacOS 10.14.6.

I found this simple sequence to get VLC to display clear, readable subtitles. I still can't control the color, font, etc. but at least the subtitles are readable.

After launching VLC and playing a DVD and noting that subtitles are fuzzy (however you got there, and there are many ways), do the following
1) pause the movie
2) Click Subtitles->Subtitle Track->disable
3) Click Playback->Title->DVD menu (which will bring you back to the DVD's menu in the main video display window).
4) Using that menu enable subtitles. This may vary from DVD to DVD because it is the DVD's menu, not VLC's menu. For example, in my DVD I would click Languages->Subtitles English for the Hard of Hearing
5) return to the main menu using the DVD's menu (in this DVD, I would click Main Menu)
6) restart playback and PRESTO the subtitles should be clear.

At least this worked for me. Can't promise it will work for everyone.

The key seems to be to disable subtitles in VLC's menu, which seems to reset something, then re-enable subtitles using the DVD's menu. This is consistent with what some others have posted and it is thanks to their posts that I found a fix.

I believe I can avoid this problem altogether if I NEVER enable subtitles using VLC's menu, but we'll see how it goes.

good luck to all.

BTW though I would love to see this fixed, I understand it would take some volunteer many hours to fix it and I consider this an acceptable work around.

[NoxFerocia]

Like many others I still seeing this issue with WB authored discs, but I have some additional info...

in addition to the grey shadows of the subtitles, I experienced problems chanigng subtitle langues (from VLC) as well. It also took the extra step of setting a different language then going through the DVD menus to set the correct language (which then showed up normally.

an additional facet I discovered was that ripping just the main movie to ISO for archiving completely removed the problems experienced by VLC... which points to a source cause

if anyone tackles this code issue, I suspect the problem stems from either malformed or missing defaults being pushed by the menu system, or preroll inserts. VLC may be either trying to honor them and not updating mid stream (more likely), or not filling in with preset defaults (most hardware players just use their own defaults regardless, ignoring any disc specified colors).

[MickM]

These ugly looking subtitles have been perhaps my biggest issue with VLC for years. I have many movies that I've ripped where subtitles have been professionally burned into the movie itself and, obviously, those look great. However, when the subtitle tracks are selectable the font they come up in looks, well, disgusting. They're like chunky 5x7 dot matrix things with an equally ugly outline. VLC has options to set the subtitle font and size and, as near as I can tell, nothing about changing those options actually does anything at all. It would be good if this long standing problem could get fixed!

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Changing font size is for textual subtitles. DVD subtitles are images, not text. And yes, they are at SD resolutions; that's DVD resolution.