[vlc] Re: Subtitles with VLC

[Derk-Jan Hartman]

On dinsdag, aug 19, 2003, at 23:09 Europe/Amsterdam, Henry Brade wrote:
> Hello there.
>  
> I'm very impressed of your great mediaplayer, but there's 1 thing I'm 
> kinda disappointed with. That's subtitles.

Sorry for that.

> I don't use subtitles because I don't need them, but sometimes I watch 
> movies with my mom or somebody else who needs subtitles. Or the movie 
> is chinese or something and then I need them too.
> I installed bsplayer to work as secondary when I need subtitles. The 
> best solution of course is to have everything work with 1 player.

agreed.

> I don't know if there's something wrong with your subtitle-functions 
> but I didn't get it to work. I chose subtitle when I opened a file and 
> browsed for the right file and no luck, tried many times.

First of all what platform are you using? As Benjamin said, only on 
Windows, MacOS and BeOS a standard font for subtitles is specified (or 
should be). if you use Linux or something you will need to specify the 
font yourself.
Besides that, subtitle files exist in at least 15 formats. There's no 
standard and each format has it's advantages. At the moment we only 
support 6 formats. If you can send us (part of) the file in question, 
than maybe we can improve our support.

> And what the heck is it with all those subtitle encoders? That's a bit 
> ridiculous. No other subtitle-client asks for subtitle text encoder, 
> so I of course used the default one since I don't have any clue what 
> it means.

They are not subtitle encoders. They are text _encodings_. Over the 
world many different characters are used. In the old days these 
characters were divided into sets. The chinese used a different set 
then the japanese or the french or the americans (and the standard body 
ISO, Windows and mac all made different implementations of all these 
sets). Only since recently Unicode/UTF-8 (sets to encompass all 
characters) have started to appear. This is only slowly making it's way 
in the world of computers however.
ATM we simply don't know how to determine in which language/character 
set a subtitle file was written, therefore if you have one in non 
western europe you have to specify the text encoding by hand.
If you know how we can determine the encoding of all of the 15 
different subtitle formats please inform us :)

> So I'd like to know how to get subtitles working or when are you gonna 
> fix it. Otherwise I love your player, GOOD work.

Perhaps you have noticed, but we (actually sigmund augdal) have been 
really hard at work at subtitles. You are now able to render them at 
arbitrary size and you can specify the font you would like to use for 
that. These have been great leaps forward in our subtitle support over 
the past 2 months for which we really have to thank him.

Improvements will follow, but it all takes time, and the resources of 
the development team are limited.
DJ

---
Videolan - VLC media player
Derk-Jan Hartman (thedj at users.sourceforge.net)
Co-Developer of the MacOS X port of vlc
http://www.videolan.org/vlc

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