[MPlayer-dev-eng] Re: [PATCH] new odml patch version 8

[The Wanderer]

Tobias Diedrich wrote:

> The Wanderer wrote:
> 
>> Uploading now, filename soft-subtitles-in-OpenDML.avi, no
>> accompanying text file. It'll take a couple of hours to complete.
>> 
>> And thank you very much for your attention to this issue. Of the
>> things which are fixable in G1, this is perhaps the biggest hole in
>> MPlayer for my own purposes.
> 
> Hmmm.  It is a regular Substation Alpha subtitle file embedded into
> the avi in a text stream.  Text stream are mentioned in the MSDN but
> there are no specifications.  This particular one is in a format
> devised by Gabest (VobSub, Media Player Classic).  It might be
> reasonably simple to add support, the main problem I see is that the
> subreader code expects a file and not a chunk of memory.

...Hmm again. I know that MPlayer can handle embedded subtitle streams;
I'm >90% certain I've seen it do so in OGMs. It would therefore seem
reasonable to expect it to be possible to make it able to do so in AVIs,
in much the same way.

I'll have a look at the subreader source and see if I can understand the
problem... I doubt I'll be able to fix it, at least not without breaking
emus worth of other things, but there's always a chance.

> The most simple solution would be an extra program that just dumps
> the subtitles into an additional file, which the normal subreader
> functionality would pick up:

The trouble with this proposed solution is that most of the time, the
files I'm wanting to play are going to be on CD, which is a read-only
filesystem. The program provided could be modified (though I'm not sure
how, short of hardcoding paths or requiring another argument) to allow
writing to a different location from the one of the AVI file, but that
would add a layer of complexity, and then require specifying the
subtitle file at playtime - and while I'm not too lazy to do this most
of the time, it does happen, and there's no guarantee that everyone else
who might want to play such things isn't even lazier than I am.

-- 
       The Wanderer

A government exists to serve its citizens, not to control them.