crazy subtitles windows media player classic

[kidkunjer]

Hi everyone,
this is a little tl;dr so bare with me...
I'm in china, the land of dodgy (semi-legit) dvds. And i've got a dvd i want to play to my students in thier lecture theatre. I do this once a week so I know it usually works.
At my apartment on a normal dvd player and on my computer the dvd's subtitles (in chinese) work absolutely fine, and they used to work fine on the lecture theatre's computer too only now they sudenly don't.
They come out all scrobbled, covered with static and noise that flickers in and out like bad tracking on a vhs.
its a school computer that people regularly mess with, the OS is in chinese. it uses windows media player classic. its just a normal pc linked to a projector and like i say it used to work fine.
The Technicians are useless (aren't they all?) and i think i need to point them in the right direction.
any ideas what settings or mucking about by idiots could lead to this weird phenomena?
so far all dvds subs are scrambled but some more than others. I don't think it looks like a scaling issue... as as i say it used to be fine.
It's all very embarrassing havin a hall filled with 50+ students who are expecting something you cannot delivar.

[AlanHK]

Try VLC instead. Compact, free and it works.

[kidkunjer]

that's what i use at home, unfortunately there are no installing rights for non administrators on that computer, and even if there were the whole thing is in chinese.
i think i may be stuck with wmpc

edit: i should add that the dvds subs play fine on wmp at home as well as vlc and the player on my acer laptop...

[AlanHK]

that's what i use at home, unfortunately there are no installing rights for non administrators on that computer, and even if there were the whole thing is in chinese.
i think i may be stuck with wmpc

edit: i should add that the dvds subs play fine on wmp at home as well as vlc and the player on my acer laptop...

Lean on them.
Ask the technicians to install VLC (in English) then, if they can't fix WMP.


Or you could reencode the video to AVI with the subs burnt in. That should be pretty foolproof.