Subtitle coloring

[Gildas Bazin]

On Saturday 01 December 2001 09:43, Tom wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 29, 2001 at 10:23:35AM +0000, Hamish Marson wrote:
> > Why not simply move the dratted things down BELOW the level of the actual
> > picture frame? The window IS resizable after all.. It would be much better
> > (IMNSHO) if the subtitles were just below the actual picture, thus not
> > detracting from the movie. If it's playing in fullscreen and can't get any
> > extra space at the bottom, THEN it would be (Just) acceptable to put it
> > over the top of the picture, but otherwise, why bother?
> 
> since almost all movies are widescreen, there's usually lots of space
> on the bottom, even in fullscreen.
> 

It would surely be a lot more clever to do as you suggest. But unfortunately 
it won't be that trivial to implement in vlc because only the video_output 
plugin knows there is unused space in the video window.
If you take 16/9 movies for example, vlc's mpeg decoder will produce a 16/9 
picture and will handle this picture to the SPU (sub-picture unit) which in 
turn will overlay the subtitles and finally pass the result to the 
video_output plugin. This plugin thus receives a 16/9 picture and only then 
will add the top and bottom black strip when resizing the picture to fit the 
display.

Idealy we should change this so that the SPU module can overlay its subtitles 
directly on the output and not on the decoded picture.
This will also allow for better optimizations because we could use hardware 
acceleration to overlay the subtitles on the display.

Unfortunately we also need to keep enough control on the display position of 
the subtitles for example to deal with DVD menus...

Are they any plans to implement something like this ?

--
Gildas