Nah, their instance is blocked on mine.

Not the first time I see this, I guess it’s time to either host my own instance or find one with less righteous admins.

I only know the word as a derogatory term and have no idea who you are trying to offend with that.

What exactly lead you to believe it serves an M3U file?

Even if you had good intentions with that, throwing common solutions that obviously won’t work at someone only leads to them wasting time. It’s not a good thing to do.

Well, it’s using funny JS, you learn how it works and trick it into downloading the fragments.

But why would you bother doing that if the movie is available on public trackers in better quality?

MPV is pretty much a gold standard for video players, it’s a bit more keyboard focused, but basic functionality is fully accessible through the GUI.

But I don’t think VLC should struggle with embedded subtitles. Maybe you can feed your video file to ffprobe and share the output for a bit of troubleshooting?