How to See Pretty Subtitles for MKVs and SoftSubs

Calophi — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 18:28:23 +0000

There’s been a lot of debate going around about subbing groups encoding things with SoftSubs or in MKV format. I used to hate those things too, but now I find that they’re pretty awesome, especially for taking screenshots! So I did a little research and put together a little guide to get things looking pretty on Windows and Mac, displaying subtitles the way the group intended for them to look.

To see what I mean, check out these screenshots:

VS.

Realize VLC Sucks

Don’t get me wrong. I use VLC all the time – it plays EVERYTHING and it’s easy to screencap from. HOWEVER. For MKVs and SoftSubs, it really, really, really sucks. A few issues I’ve encountered:

Displays programming it can’t understand in curly braces {}.
Displays in an ugly default font.
Sometimes, ugly default font is jaggedy and unreadable depending on the programming.
It renders multiple simultaneous subtitle lines on top of each other, making both unreadable.

There’s more, but these are the ones that irritated me.

Also be aware that VLC has a lot of older codecs and libraries that, besides making ugly subtitles, cause other issues, such as the h264 videos loading slower. Also, their settings are maybe a bit TOO complex and not very user friendly.

Pretty Subtitles In Windows

If you’re watching these types of files in windows, you really ought to be using The Combined Community Codec Pack (CCCP). Wipe out any other codecs and players on your system and install CCCP, and you will never need anything else. There’s nothing more to it!

The site provides you with a utility to help track down your stray codecs, and the pack itself contains two very awesome players – Media Player Classic and Zoom Player. Don’t download them separately – use the ones that come with CCCP. Trust me, you’ll be glad you did.

Pretty Subtitles On The Mac

This is a smidgen more complicated than Windows, but not much more, I promise!

Step 1

Download and install MPlayer. You want MPlayer OS X 1.0rc1.

Step 2

Open up the preferences menu. On my machine, it’s on the top bar under MPlayer OSX:

Step 3

Under the “General” tab, set your font mirroring the settings below. You don’t have to use Gulim – any true type font (.ttf) will do. Also feel free to set the font size to “normal” instead of “small” -I just prefer mine smaller by default.

Step 4: Final Step!

Click the “Miscellaneous” tab. Check off the “Additional Settings” checkbox and paste in this line:

-ass -embeddedfonts -correct-pts -sid 0

If this doesn’t work, try adding -fontconfig at the end.

MPlayer Extras

If you still aren’t seeing subtitles, be aware of these two shortcut keys:

v: toggles subtitles on and off
j: shuffles through subtitles if there is more than one option

REJOICE!

You should have pretty subtitles now. These are the best options available as far as I know, though of course there is always a user choice in these things. Hopefully this has helped you out a little!

References

Here are the references and links I’ve used for this post.

AnimeJB Dot Net » mkvs softsubs