Gentoo: get pretty VLC subtitles

local_offer
IT

While the subtitles of the VLC player on Gentoo looked rather ugly, they looked nice on Windows—to a point it really bothered me. After some online searching, I came across a forum post that helped me to resolve it rather easily:

  1. In VLC, go to Tools → Preferences
  2. Bottom left under Show settings select All
  3. Find Subtitles / OSD → Text renderer

  4. Under Font (on the very top), you must enter the complete path to the font, and not just the font name itself, e.g.:

    /usr/share/fonts/noto/NotoSans-Bold.ttf
  5. If desired, also set background, outline, and shadow, while you’re at it.

Unfortunately, if you later make changes to the Subtitle settings using the Simple settings view, it will reset the font back to the default entry (in my case “Liberation Sans”), which will result in ugly looking subtitles again. So do all changes only by using the All settings view.

Before: Weird looking VLC subtitles under Gentoo Linux
Before: Weird looking VLC subtitles under Gentoo Linux

After: Setting the font path instead of the font name results in pretty looking subtitles
After: Setting the font path instead of the font name results in pretty looking subtitles