Unidentified codec: VLC could not identify the audio or video codec

My default media player on Debian 11 is VLC media player 3.0.16 Vetinari (revision 3.0.13-8-g41878ff4f2)

When playing recorded videos (MKV container) I would get the error message.

Is this "Error" message fault on part of VLC or has it got something to do with settings of my TVH?

I think it does not like the "S_DVBSUB" as the subtitles are not working when I turn them on and the error msg. comes on again:

Unidentified codec: VLC could not identify the audio or video codec

The same file would play OK with mpv 0.32.0 ( Debian 11 ) and show the subtitles correctly.

VLC has no support for MKV S_DVBSUB codec format

The commit that introduced the comment (and the code which ignores subtitles when the viewer is VLC) references this VLC bug:

It seems the bug will finally be squashed in VLC 4.0.

Dave Pickles wrote:
> The Tvheadend source has this comment at https://github.com/tvheadend/tvheadend/blob/master/src/muxer/muxer_mkv.c#L1565 > [...]
> The commit that introduced the comment (and the code which ignores subtitles when the viewer is VLC) references this VLC bug:
>
> https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/14577 "undertale yellow"

> It seems the bug will finally be squashed in VLC 4.0.

Make sure you are using the latest version of VLC. Developers regularly release updates that include improvements and support for new codecs.