Unable to disable subtitles in Kodi

[RAHRL]

I recently encountered a strange problem with subtitles in Kodi with a possible relation to MakeMKV.

I bought a Scandanavian DVD box of Bud Spencer & Terence Hill with 16 discs and when I play one of the discs directly with VLC Player, I am obliged to select a language for subtitles. There is no option “no subtitles” available in the dvd menu.

After I ripped a disc with MakeMKV and used VLC Player to play that, I do have the possibility to turn off subtitles in the VLC menu and that works.

When I looked at the .mkv file with mkvmerge -J it showed 4 subtitle tracls, all of them enabled, with default-flag = off and force-flag = off.

I never hard-burn subtitles in mkv files.

But when I play that same mkv file in Kodi from my Nvidia Shield, it is impossible to turn off subtitles. My standard subtitle settings in Kodi are Dutch,English and that has worked perfectly so far. And I was always able to turn off or on subtitles while playing a movie by going to the subtitle menu and toggle the enable subtitling switch.

But with the pertained movies, the enable subtitling switch does not do anything. Even with the switch enable subtitles on off, the subtitles are still displayed. Subtitles are standard on Swedish (indicated as default), and I am able to change that to one of the other languages, but it is impossible to turn subtitling off alltogether. When I toggle the switch, nothing happens.

Preferrably, I don’t want to change my global Kodi subtitle settings, because they worked so well so far. There must be something in that mkv file that causes Kodi to behave like this and I would like to know what that is.

I am considering 2 workarounds, that I’d rather not do.
1. Remove all 4 subtitle tracks from each of the 16 movies with MKVmerge so Kodi is not able to select them anymore.
2. Add an empty subtitle track to the MakeMKV file, designate that as default, and hoping that Kodi will use this track by default (not sure this will work)

But what I’d really would like to know is what I can do, to get the enable toggle switch in Kodi working for the pertained mkv files without editing them too much.

[RAHRL]

Just want to add: same issue with Kodi on Windows. Unable to disable subtitles.

But again, they cannot be hard-coded as I am able to turn them off in VLC-Player using that same MKV-file.

[RAHRL]

This problem is further discussed on the Kodi Forum:

Kodi (Windows and Android TV): unable to disable subtitles.
https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=379599

It seems to be specific Kodi behaviour on VOBSUB subtitles that have the forced flag on at line-level (i.e. not track/MKV-container-level).

[flojo]

You mean in the file stream.

I'm sure it's a Kodi bug and that you're right that you'd probably be better off adding a empty subtitle track. Possibly "side-car" one on the filesystem with $filename.srt and see if it will load that first, I'm curious if it does.

I find Kodi to be an extremely buggy player today. I also find it having less useful features than it did on XBOX as XBMC circa 2007 (the default distro should absolutely come with projectM).

[RAHRL]

I'm sure it's a Kodi bug and that you're right that you'd probably be better off adding a empty subtitle track. Possibly "side-car" one on the filesystem with $filename.srt and see if it will load that first, I'm curious if it does.

A Kodi bug or correct, but undesired behaviour, the difference can be tiny. But I am satisfied with the current situation because an elegant work-around exists.
In my case, subtitles in Kodi default to the .srt file, I presume because the name of the .srt file matches the language of the audio track. And because the subtitles in the .srt file are not forced, they can also be switched off in Kodi (if the .srt file were not empty).

I find Kodi to be an extremely buggy player today. I also find it having less useful features than it did on XBOX as XBMC circa 2007 (the default distro should absolutely come with projectM).

Last year, I tested VLC, Kodi and MX on my Android TV-box. I don’t know about many more alternatives. VLC is by far my favorite player on Windows, but it lacks functionality on Android TV.
MX was a complete disaster. It came up with a smartphone format screen, and perhaps that is what the product is primarily meant for.
Kodi works well, but seems to be a very complex product with all the available add-ons that need to keep working after every Kodi upgrade. Every time, I start Kodi up, I am praying it will actually work, but somehow it does most of the time. SMB Shares in Kodi didn’t work well from the start, I have them defined on the Nvidia Shield box itself but even the Nvidia looses those shares simetimes. The Nvidia box direly needs a reset button, because I have to unplug the power cable once a week when it freezes, something you would not expect of a product from a multi-billion dollar company in the forefront of technology.