[purpleman]

As for subtitle streams, as I understand, they are handled not by a DSplayer itself but by a splitter filter. Try to set up your splitter. E.g. AVsplitter allows you to select default languages for audio and subs.

Thanks for your reply, however - you're mistaken. dsplayer is in control of the splitter, not the other way around:

The way it works (and I've read the source code to confirm this) is dsplayer querys the splitter for a list of available subtitle streams embedded in the (mkv) file. The splitter then reports back with the list, and dsplayer builds an internal array with matching entries. So if the splitter returned a list of 3 streams (eng,spa,fre), dsplayer's array would then be: [1. English] [2. Spanish] [3. French] (in this exact order). After that's done, dsplayer calls another function that checks for available EXTERNAL (file/srt) subtitles. If it finds such a file (German, for instance), it appends it to the end of the array so we get [1. English] [2. Spanish] [3. French] [4. German (External)]. After the array is built, dsplayer plays the first subtitle in the array (in our case - English from the splitter).

This behaviour is bad. It should be one of two options:

1) scan for external subtitles BEFORE querying the splitter (thus adding external subtitles to the top of the list) - this makes sense because if you bothered placing an external file, it's logical that you want that file to be selected.
2) leave the scanning order as it is, but after scanning is complete check xbmc's preferred subtitle language setting and automatically set to that language (whether it's internal from the splitter or external from a file).

by the way, dvdplayer does both (checks preferred language AND prefers external subtitles first).

I'd really love for this to get fixed, hope you can help