MX Player subtitles not showing

First: is a track actually selected?

Tap the screen during playback and open the subtitle menu. If it readsNone, or no track is ticked, MX Player has not loaded anything — which means the rest of the settings are irrelevant until that changes.

For a sidecar file to be picked up automatically it has to sit in the same folder as the video and share its basename:Film.2019.mp4 beside Film.2019.srt. A file calledsubtitles.srt, or one left in Downloads while the video is elsewhere, will not be found.

Then: can the app read that folder?

This is the modern cause and the one that looks least like a subtitle problem. Recent Android releases restrict which directories an app may read. If the subtitle sits somewhere MX Player was never granted access to, the app genuinely cannot see it, even though your file manager shows it plainly and the video in the same folder plays.

Two ways past it: grant MX Player access to that location when it asks, or move both files into a folder it already reads. If a file appears in the manual open-subtitle browser but never loads automatically, permissions are the first thing to suspect.

If the track is inside the video

Embedded text tracks in an MKV generally load. Image-based tracks — PGS from Blu-ray, VobSub from DVD — often do not render on Android, and some builds cannot decode them at all, which looks identical to no subtitles existing.

Extracting the track to a plain .srt removes the ambiguity, and the result works on every player rather than this one.MKV subtitles that will not sync has the commands, including what to do when the track turns out to be images.

If they appear but you cannot read them

Boxes, question marks or strings like привет mean the file loaded and is being decoded with the wrong character table. In MX Player, open the subtitle menu during playback and look for Encoding or Text encoding. Try UTF-8 first; if that is not it, pick the code page matching the language — Windows-1251 for Cyrillic, Windows-1252 for Western European, Big5 or GBK for Chinese, Shift-JIS for Japanese.

That setting changes how MX Player reads the file and nothing else, so the same file will still be wrong on your TV, in a browser, and for anyone you send it to.Converting the file to UTF-8fixes it once, everywhere.

If they appear at the wrong moments

Then nothing above applies: the file is loading and decoding correctly, and you have a timing problem. Which correction you need depends on whether the gap stays constant or grows as the video plays — thetiming diagnostic sorts that out in two questions.

Worth knowing on a phone specifically: a player-side subtitle delay is discarded when playback ends, and it never travels with the file. Correcting the file means the same copy is right on the phone, on the TV, and in whatever plays it next.