Re: [Bino-list] SubTitles?

[Joe]

Hi!

On Saturday 09 April 2011 11:36:19 Martin Lambers wrote:
> On 07/04/11 02:50, Joe wrote:
> > please see attached patch that implements all the GUI parts. Applies
> > clearly to current git head.
> 
> Thanks a lot, it is now merged, with the only exception of the encoding
> setting (see below).
> 
> >> In summary, the current state of subtitle support is:
> >> - Subtitles in plain text and SSA/ASS format can be decoded and
> >> rendered
> >> (via libass) with support for alpha blending.
> >> - Subtitles in bitmap format (mostly DVD subtitles) currently only
> >> decode to the string '???'. Proper support will be added later.
> >> - Subtitle selection is currently only possible via the command line,
> >> but code for GUI selection and keyboard shortcuts is available in your
> >> repository and will be merged soon.
> >> - Subtitle parameters cannot yet be set. The most important parameter
> >> is
> >> probably the subtitle depth for 3D video. Other parameters seem less
> >> important because they can be easily adjusted in the subtitle file.
> > 
> > Other parameters are important as well. There are almost no subtitles
> > that has defined styles in header and users does not set subtitle style
> > inside subtitle file. It is crucial to be able to force at least size
> > and color in Bino. Therefore the patch override the ASS font, font size
> > and font color using ass_set_style_overrides.
> 
> OK, merged. I adjusted the settings so that the user can override them
> separately. This is useful for ASS, where subtitle files usually define
> a style and you may only want to change one parameter.

At least in my country no one has ever seen subtitles in ASS format. All the 
subs are in SRT (previously in SUB) format. So that everybody will force 
subtitles size, font and color to some sane values (bigger fonts, sometimes 
yellow color and national encoding).

> > There is also an issue with font encoding. ASS does not perform encoding
> > so I think we will have to do it ourselves. I know you want to avoid
> > using Qt, so should we use iconv?
> 
> I'm not sure that I understand the problem completely. According to the
> spec, ASS files should be UTF-8, and if they are not, they should set a
> special "Encoding" field. When FFmpeg converts SRT to ASS, it should
> also handle this for us.
> 
> Are there in fact SRT files that use old 8 bit encodings instead of
> UTF-8? If so, is there SRT metadata that tells us what encoding the file
> is in?
> 
> If we require the user to set the encoding for each SRT file
> individually, wouldn't it be easier for the user to just convert all SRT
> files to UTF-8 and solve the problem once and for all?

I suppose you are from English speaking country, so you don't need to use 
subtitles with almost every movie you watch. For example I'm from Czech 
Republic and we have encoding cp1250 in Windows and iso8859-2 in Unix. All the 
subtitles that we use every day are in cp1250 simply because most of the 
people translating movies are using Windows and cp1250 was the default 
encoding. It has became de facto standard and even now when default changed to 
UTF-8 are still all subtitles in cp1250, because for media players it is 
almost impossible to detect correct encoding (there are no metadata). So in 
every media player I go to settings and select cp1250 (for example my 
mplayer.conf contains "subcp=cp1250"). Please merge also encoding selection, 
default will be utf-8 and hopefully ffmpeg will handle encoding conversion (I 
have not noticed it is possible to change encoding during subtitle decoding).

I hope my country is not the only one with these weird demands :-) If someone 
non-native-english is reading this, please comment on situation with subtitles 
in your country.

Bye,
Joe.