Adding Subtitles to MKV, AVI, or other Movie formats (on Mac)

If you’re a Mac user like me and have been searching for years (okay exaggeration, weeks) for a solution to your subtitle woes because VLC player keeps crashing or you have a player that does not recognize or support the srt, ssa, ass subtitle file, then don’t worry anymore because I’m going to help you make your lives easier.

They all say that VLC plays everything but they forgot to say that it crashes most of the time especially for MKV files or huge video files. VLC just can’t take it. But for Mac users, we have an alternative, MOVIST! Google designed and made it so it’s surely fast and reliable. Am loving it better than VLC player. You can download it here.

Next one has to understand how subtitle files work. One must place the movie file (.avi, .mkv, etc) AND subtitle file (.srt, .ssa, .ass, etc) in the SAME directory/folder and both must have THE SAME NAME. So for example, MOVIENAME.avi and MOVIENAME.srt should be in same folder. Rename them if you have to. Here’s what I did for a movie I want, Studio Ghibli’s The Borrower Arrietty (lovely movie, go watch it!).

After downloading Movist, open your movie file (in my case, The Borrower Arriety 2010.mkv) with Movist like so

You would notice that the name of the movie file + indication of the subtitle (SubRip) should be loaded during the first few seconds of the film but if there’s none (which is most likely the case), we would need to do some tweaking. One needs to understand that subtitle files are usually made in windows and their file encoding could be in ANSI but transferring this subtitle file to Mac can change it to UTF-8.

So now while movie is opened, go to Movist’s PREFERENCES

Under SUBTITLE tab, check the ENABLE SUBTITLE option and make sure TEXT ENCODING is set to UTF-8 (usually it’s not)

And there you have it! Now play your movie and enjoy. Hope this helps everyone