External .ASS subs with attached fonts is not displaying the fonts.
VLC on Xbox1 (and also Desktop version) does not use fonts that are attached in external .ASS subtitles.
In a similar way that you can "attach" a font into a MKV file and have that font available to VLC when the .ASS subtitle calls for it, it's also possible to attach the font directly in the .ASS file itself. Doing it this way you don't have to mux anything into the MKV and just have a single external .ASS file which contains within itself all the fonts it needs.
Take for example this sample .ASS file that I've created in Aegisub:
This .ASS file has two fonts attached within it. Rename the ass filename to any video filename for testing and place in the same directory as your testing video.
For example:
- YourTestVideo.mkv
- YourTestVideo.ass (this is the sample.ass file renamed to match the video)
Now play the video and you will see from 1-5 seconds the first subtitle line and from 6-10 seconds the 2nd subtitle line. These two lines make use of the special fonts attached in the .ASS file.
It should appear like these screenshots show:
However with VLC player these fonts are not seen and you get a generic font instead. But with other mediaplayers that I used for testing the fonts show up correctly.
You can install Aegisub and open this .ASS file and choose from the menu File->Attachments where you can see the two fonts are there, you can extract them and you can also attach any other fonts too.
You can also mux this .ASS file into a new MKV with your video and now VLC plays it correctly. But this is because MKVMerge reads the fonts from the .ASS file an adds them as a MKV attachment when you mux it. And this type of "MKV attachment" is what VLC can handle fine. But ".ASS attachment" is not fine.
Please look into that. I tried to explain it as best as I can so I hope my point come through. This is important because the fonts that ASS files use are sometimes special fonts to add graphics or translate signs and other reasons, and these need to be displayed the right way as intended by the script author.
Thanks in advance if you can fix it. The alternative for now is to mux the subs into a new MKV but obviously can be better to support external .ASS subs with attached fonts in them. Thanks. :)