free software player still a fantasy?

[yao847zi]

may not, but powerdvd is great for playback blu-ray on pc

[MilesAhead]

may not, but powerdvd is great for playback blu-ray on pc

VLC now supports both XSub and PGS subtitles. Seems crash prone on my Windows Seven PC though. I'm starting to like SPlayer but I'd have to export the PGS subs as idx/sub. Still, it does have hw acceleration and seems stable. They seem to have taken the approach of fetching text subs off the net instead of natively supporting the subs. Doesn't even support DVD .sup subtitles that are in the DVD. Nice player otherwise though.

edit: Playing around with SPlayer a bit more, looks like the trick is to make the DVD into an .iso image and mount it as a virtual drive. Then it can be opened using the SPlayer context menu. From a mounted disc image it will display selectable subs. Sweet.