VLC media player for macOS Troubleshooting • Re: Hardcoding Subtitles Issue


I’ve tried to do some debugging by running the VLC binary in verbose mode:

Code:

/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --verbose=2

This opens up the VLC UI interface and allows me to see what’s going on in the background since all the output is shown in the terminal.

The bug that prevents hardcoding subtitles on Mac is related to the container format (MPEG 1, MPEG 4, MPEG TS, etc.). Out of all the available container formats, only MPEG TS hardcodes the subtitles. For some reason, all other formats result in an error like the following: ~snip~

Thank you so much! I tried everything, and nothing worked until I used the container format of MPEG TS.

If it helps someone, these are the exact steps I used: From File, I chose Convert/Stream. I used Open media… to pick the file I wanted, then on the next line I clicked on Customize. In the Encapsulation tab, I chose the actual format I wanted (MKV). In the Video codec tab, my “Keep original video track” box was already unchecked… but others have made mention of it needing to be unchecked, so I’m making note of it. In the Subtitles tab I checked “Subtitle overlay” and picked “DVB subtitle” to the right. (The other option “T.140” didn’t work.) I also checked “Overlay subtitles on the video”. I hit “Apply”, then chose a destination and name and hit Save. After just a few seconds, I stopped it. (This was only to get the settings saved. This file didn’t keep the subtitles.)

I then went back into Convert/Stream, clicked Customize, and this time in the Encapsulation tab I chose MPEG TS. I hit “Apply”, told it to overwrite the first file, and hit stop as soon as it got to the point where I wanted to stop. (I only needed a snippet, not the whole file.)

Noteworthy for anyone who wants to debug: I wanted to save it in the MKV format, so that was what it was set to before I tried MPEG TS. Despite MPEG TS being the selection, it properly saved in the MKV format with subtitles (not that I’m complaining, since that was the format I wanted).

Statistics: Posted by tmstech — 31 May 2024 21:27