Ron, I appreciate you taking the time to tell us about this!
I downloaded the subtitle player, then got everything you said. Then I went and got the subtitles to an episode of the British show Afterlife that I had. The player opened the .avi, and the subtitles and worked beautifully. Makes me mad now because I had ALL the episodes, but deleted all but that one, for some reason...
Anyway, the subtitle player started displaying the message "Sorry, the subtitle player will only display subtitles for 45 minutes until you buy it..."
But it looks worth it. I'm going to try the black vid method with surfthechannel.com and see if I can get it to work for some of the streaming vids there like you described for YouTube, et al.
Thanks, man! 
