Reliable Codec Packages...

Originally Posted by PUG1911

I really don't understand why people don't just use VLC. Not only does it work without any bullshit, but it'd save .torrent sites from having a million and one 'How I make movie play?' comments.

Yep, though I wish VLC and MPlayer would finally catch up at more advanced subtitle formats.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Cless

The reason they don't is that the "more advance subtitle formats" use vobsub for rendering, which isn't available on platforms other than Windows. Since both VLC and mplayer are open-source, cross-platform projects, they are committed to maintaining feature parity amongst all their binary distributions for different OSes. Until vobsub goes open-source/cross-platform, you won't see it in either player.

Besides, I like plain subs.

Me too (plain *.srt or good hard subs) but that's hardly the point, is it?
When it comes to the little multimedia wonders from planet Windows, waiting for anything to go open source has almost never been an option. "Re-write from scratch" just happens to be the formula the Linux people archieved the most with up until now. It wouldn't hurt to write a completly new, open-source rendering engine for *.ssa and *.ass subs, the same way it didn't hurt to write a music player/media library that already surpasses the famed iTunes in many respects (I'm talking - of course - about amaroK).

Edit:
Oh and Wikipedia just tells me, the VSFilter is actually licenced under the GPL.

There's nowhere I can't reach.