DirectVobSub: mkv playback issue in MPC with VobSub subtitles

[augustin]

Hi forum,
thanks a lot for existing. I've been lurking until now. Here is my first post:

The attached VobSub subtitles are ripped with VSRip from a PAL DVD. I mux them to some XviD-1.1.2-01112006 encoded video stream with mkvmerge and obtain an mkv file. Audio streams don't matter. Playback of this file causes the following problems in Media Player Classic:
Subtitles don't show,
playback is choppy, i.e. freezes every some seconds for some frames.

I use Combined-Community-Codec-Pack-2007-02-22 and mkvtoolnix-unicode-2.0.2-1-setup with all the standard settings. That means: MPC uses ffdshow video decoder, DirectVobSub, and Haali Media Splitter for playback.

All my other encodes with VobSub subtitles perfectly work with exactly the same settings, so I assume that the problem is caused by the subtitles in combination with DirectVobSub.

VLC media player doesn't show the subtitles either, but also works perfectly for my other encodes.
In mplayer everything works fine (as it dosn't use DirectVobSub), but I'd like to stick to MPC, and maybe it is interesting to find out what makes the attached subtitle file so weird.
Thanks in advance for helping me

[augustin]

One year later I tried again and finally managed to handle these subs. I answer to myself as somebody else might be interested in this solution.
I don't remember if the subs didn't show at all, or just very bad last year. Now they show very bad, invisible on black background, and playback isn't choppy anymore. I don't know the reason for this improvement, but I reinstalled my system, and now use Combined-Community-Codec-Pack-2008-01-24.exe

Now the solution I found:
Something with the colors or the transparency seams to be incompatible with vsfilter. So I replaced the palette of my weirdsubs with the palette of some subs that don't cause problems. Then I loaded them in SubtitleCreator (Tools / Manipulate SUP or VobSub / Open Sub.) and adjusted the subtitle colors, so that they use the right colors of the palette for the 4 "zones" of the bitmaps (the background, outer and inner borders of the letters, and the inner of the letters). After this modification the subs show perfectly.
Not very difficult, if you know what to do.
Comments appreciated