[MPlayer-dev-eng] A proposal for the OSD

[D Richard Felker III]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2003 at 12:02:10PM -0500, Daniel A. Nagy wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 13, 2003 at 12:38:28PM +0100, Dirk wrote:
> > 2) FESTIVAL!!!! -- that lib AFAIK isn't GPL but since MPlayer can play 
> > every format out there it should be able to play ("read") any text file 
> > too... or it should be able to put quote screens from pre-audio-movies via 
> > ocr (above) into words too... imagine THAT!
> 
> Afaik, Festival has a gpl-compatible license. It's basically free software,
> but it is _very_ langauge dependent, how you read written text. The free
> package includes Limey English, Yank English, Castilian Spanish and Welsh
> languages. There are other data sets for festival that make it capable of
> speaking in other languages (I have heard the Russian female voice for
> festival developed by Lucent -- it's sexy!), but the majority of those
> aren't free.
> 
> Furthermore, I think, it doesn't really belong to mplayer. I mean there's
> no point in up-to-10ms synchronization with festival, so you can just write
> a separate program that starts reading aloud subtitles and launches mplayer
> in -nosound mode simultaneously.

This will NOT maintain any a/v sync at all; the results will be
horrible. Instead, just open two-way pipes to festival and read the
audio back at the appropriate rate.

However, this whole idea is totally lame... It's like crappy dubbing,
only tons worse because there's no attempt to keep timing in line with
the lips... If you want to watch a film originally made in a foreign
language, than for goodness sake, WATCH IT IN THE ORIGINAL LANGUAGE!
And read the subtitles or a separate script file if you can't
understand the language!

Rich