certain subtitle lines showing as black text in multiple video players

[dstarfire]

I've downloaded subtitles for Qi (a pseudo quiz show) that shows each panelists dialogue as a separate color. Unfortunately, in a few of the files the text will have black for both the forground and background color. This behavior appears in both SMPlayer and VLC.

These are .ssa files and the headers describe them as "Sub Station Alpha v4". After looking around the files in notepad++ I discovered that all the times it displays black text, there's a color code specified within the text of the format "{\c&Howllye&}", with the 'owllye' part being any of white, cyan, lime, as well as the owllye part in the sample.

If I open the file in Subedit, these sections are shown as "<font color="#yellow">". Also, none of the styles (as shown in subedit) have black as the primary color (though all of them do have it as the tertiary and background color).

I've tried (on other files with the same problem) replacing the {\c&Howllye&} part with \rs1 (which should accomplish the same thing, since there's a style designed for each of yellow, white, cyan, and lime), but that didn't seem to work, either.

So, can somebody tell me what's going on here, and how to fix it?

[manono]

I've attached the original, unedited file, for reference.

No, you haven't.

If the different colors aren't important to you then just convert the SSA to SRT.