I recently pirated the Superman 2025 movie as a .mkv which loads captions perfectly fine on GNOME Video Player but my friend couldn’t get captions working using VLC on Mac.
Which easy to use media players can I recommend to my friends on Windows and Mac to ensure mkv captions work out of the box for them?


MPV is pretty much a gold standard for video players, it’s a bit more keyboard focused, but basic functionality is fully accessible through the GUI.
But I don’t think VLC should struggle with embedded subtitles. Maybe you can feed your video file to
ffprobeand share the output for a bit of troubleshooting?