[vlc-devel] ASS/SSA support (Was: week to 0.9.0 release)

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

About SSA, for the one who did not follow:

On Fri, Aug 08, 2008 at 08:31:25PM +0200, Derk-Jan Hartman wrote :
> On 8 aug 2008, at 16:57, Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote:
> I further intend to merge the libass branch into master. The csri  
> module is too broken and no one really likes it it seems. And in my  
> opinion we NEED to get this in order for this release, it is getting  
> us too many negative word of mouth advertising. j-b, I and fenrir have  
> been testing it for the last week and it is working as a dream, much  
> better than our old "simple-ASS-renderer" and our non-functional csri/ 
> asa module. I have thrown every weird ASA/SSA file that we have  
> received since 2004 at it and it never missed or crashed.

SSA/ASS subtitles are very complex and very much not specified.

In 0.8.x, most of SSA subs crash VLC or render very incorrectly. Add to
that that most of the biggest fansub teams make subtitles that are
directly aimed to render badly in VLC.

The libasa integration in 0.9.0 was nice but had many flaws:
 - unmaintained lib
 - external fonts not integrated (maybe our mistake, but due to the lack
   of doc, what could we do?)
 - Issues on mac and windows
 - Difficult to build
 - not much tested

The libass, late integrated, fixes all the tickets we had left about SSA
support (libasa did NOT). It might not be perfect, but it is probably one
of the best rendering implementation so far.

Hoping that this will remove a lot of the questions on the forum...

Best Regards,

-- 
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
http://www.jbkempf.com/