[Discerptor]

Okay, I've figured out the problem. To answer the questions, though, removing ass in either the GUI or commandline mplayers would make the subtitles revert to their default font. It was a .ass file with the font size, among other details, specified. Anyway, when I have a default subtitle font actually selected in the GUI, it will use this even if a different font is specified in the subtitle file (though it does not have this problem for soft-coded subtitle tracks). This made my font display in Arial Bold, which is a LOT larger than the font I was actually using. Now here's the kicker. If I have the external subtitle file in the same folder as my MKV with the softsubs made from that file, when it's on the softsub track, some letters display the way they're supposed to while others display in the Arial. Weird! The fix for this was simply to have my default subtitle font set to "none." But... at times it won't switch out of Arial even if I set it to none, until I quit and restart MPlayer (perhaps something to do with the fonts cache?). If you'd like, I can send you the subtitle file. It's 60KB in size, and we may want to talk more about the specific subtitle file through private messages.