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I am looking for a media player to play videos with two subtitles at the same time (e.g. English and Spanish).
I'm using VLC, but this feature is not there yet, although there are some workarounds using a Subtitler extension (as per this post).
However, I'd like to find a player with a native support for dual subtitles or with easy to install plugin.
Ideally free and cross-compatible with versions for Windows and macOS.
According to this list, multiple subtitles are supported by the following players:
PotPlayer is from the same developer that’s responsible for creating KMPlayer who decided to leave that project and start another. Unsurprisingly PotPlayer also has a range of subtitle options like KMPlayer, including a subtitles browser and plenty of tweaking and display options. PotPlayer can show two subtitles on the video at the same time.
KMPlayer has been able to play more than one subtitle at once for quite a few years. Apart from that ability, it also boasts a number of options for displaying, loading and saving the subtitles back out again. Some of the other subtitle features are merging subtitles together, subtitle explorer/editor, syncing, multiple display and effect options, online subtitle finder and the ability to show up to three subtitles on screen at once.
Media Player Classic – Home Cinema with a Directshow filter called VSFilter or xy-VSFilter
The disadvantage of MPC playing two subtitles at once is it can’t do it out of the box and requires you to do a few things first. Firstly, you need to install a Directshow filter called VSFilter and tick the box to configure it when the install is complete. In the Main tab tick Override placement and enter a vertical (V) number somewhere between 0-25 to put this subtitle at the top. Click OK. When you open a video file and want two subtitles, you can access the the bottom subtitle from the right click > Subtitles menu, the second subtitle is accessed via Filters > “VSFilter (auto-loading version)”, a green arrow icon in the system tray is also visible where you can right click and alter the top subtitle.
BS.Player is one of a few media players that offer a paid version for Pro version updates. Thankfully the free version handles playing two subtitles at once with ease. A few options for uploading/downloading subtitles, timings and how they get displayed are available.
Here is the list specific for macOS:
Beside KMP I've also used Media Player Classic with ffdshow filter, which are both included in the K-lite codec pack. No other filters are needed
ffdshow can be configured to display subtitles, to enable or disable various built-in codecs, to grab screenshots, to enable keyboard control, and to enhance movies with increased resolution, sharpness, and many other post-processing video filters. It has the ability to manipulate audio with effects like an equalizer, a Dolby decoder, reverb, Winamp DSP plugins, and more. Some of the postprocessing is borrowed from the MPlayer project and AviSynth filters
One subtitle will be displayed by MPC and the other is embedded in the video stream by ffdshow. In fact you can use any other players as long as ffdshow is used to decode
When ffdshow is decoding a video or audio, its icon will be shown in the notification area. Just right click it and enable Subtitle. You may need to open the configuration to select the appropriate subtitle file, or simply set different rules for MPC and ffdshow to load different subtitles
A downside of this is that the ffdshow-rendered subtitle quality will decrease if you zoom the video out, since it's embedded as images in the video stream. But so is the video's quality, so it's not a big problem
Feature-wise ffdshow is the best decoder I've ever used, with many useful filters like post-processing to increase the output quality significantly. However in the last few years the default filter has been changed to LAV filter. You can still use Codec Tweak Tool to change the default back to ffdshow if you want
