Subtitle Tracks in .mkv files on Mac OS X

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 22:39:35 -0700

Summer is the time when I spend way too much time watching anime. And when you are watching that much anime, you really want to make sure that you get the subtitles to display decently or your eyes will just hurt. Usually this is not a problem since most fansubbed anime embed the subtitles directly into the movie (.avi, .mp4, etc) file itself. However, nowadays, the Matroska .mkv file format has been gaining popularity. In the .mkv format, the subtitles are no longer embedded into the movie track but included as a separate resource that you can enable/disable at will.

Till now, there are two popular applications that can be used to open .mkv files on the mac: VLC and MPlayer. I prefer VLC because it has a better interface and is updated more frequently. And VLC seems to be open almost all video file formats. Now, there is a new plug-in called Perian for QuickTime that has been updated to enable .mkv files to be played inside QuickTime itself. And I must say, the results are fantastic. Here are some comparisons

Matroska SRT subtitles

Notice how the text is not anti-aliased. The text tends to overlap with one another and this makes them unreadable.

The text in QuickTime is more readable and does not overlap.

Matroska ASS subtitles

The text is displayed at the right positions (top and bottom) but notice how terrible the fonts look.

The text is being displayed at the right positions (top and bottom) with pretty fonts.

The images above clearly show how much better Perian handles subtitle for .mkc files and it is now my best choice for viewing anime. Additionally, if you scrutinize the images above, you can see that QuickTime actually has a combo box on the bottom right corner that lets you skip to the various sections in the animation. I have not see a way to do that in VLC. Of course, QuickTime still cannot handle every file format out there. For that I still need VLC around.

So how do subtitles work on QuickTime with Perian? When you open the .mkv file in QuickTime, it first scans the entire file (the position bar actually shows the scanning progress). During this scanning progress, you can play the anime but the subtitles will not show up. Once it is done scanning however, the subtitles will appear. If there are both .ass and .srt subtitle resources, .ass is chosen by default. You can actually see what resources are contained in the .mkv file by going to Window > Show Movie Properties.

.::output >> /dev/null::. : Tag vlc, everything about vlc

Subtitle Tracks in .mkv files on Mac OS X