10.6: Prevent a VLC crash when watching videos with subtitles

Dec 14, '09 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: CaptnEvilStomper

Snow Leopard only hintIt seems the version of X11 that ships with Snow Leopard causes some problems with VLC when it comes to videos with embedded subtitles.

In my case, whenever I tried to open an MKV file that contained subtitles, VLC would get stuck while loading the video and never actually play it. If I tried to quit the application, VLC would immediately freeze, so I'd have to force quit. Annoying to say the least.

Luckily it's pretty easy to fix. Open a Terminal window, copy and paste the following, and press Return (and enter your password when prompted):

sudo chmod a+w /usr/X11/var/cache/fontconfig
Now open your video again and it should work. The first time you try to play a video, it might take a while to load (sometimes a minute or longer), but after that you shouldn't have any problems. Note that you'll have to repeat the process after any OS update (10.6.1, 10.6.2, etc.) or security update.

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