[MPlayer-dev-eng] Subtitles

[D Richard Felker III]

On Fri, Oct 15, 2004 at 04:17:09PM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:
> D Richard Felker III wrote:
> 
> >On Fri, Oct 15, 2004 at 12:35:31PM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:
> >
> >>>Also I think that subtitle display is cool (alpha channel) and
> >>>ugly (one font without position and addons like bold, italic,
> >>>color, etc.)
> >>
> >>This is, as I understand it, because subtitles are displayed using
> >>the same system as the OSD - and that is limited to one color and
> >>knows no special styles. From my time lurking, I think it might
> >>become possible to do this if the bmovl2 filter ever gets to the
> >>point of being committed, but in the meantime I don't know how
> >>practical wanting to improve font variability is.
> >
> >bmovl2 would be an extremely slow and bloated way to do subtitles..
> >it also might be hard to get the timing right..
> 
> Perhaps so, but it's the only thing I remember seeing mentioned which
> might be able to support the more complicated forms of subtitles -
> multiple fonts, multiple colors, color changes (for things like keeping
> time with the lyrics of a song), and so forth. I'll readily admit that
> it might be an inefficient and highly suboptimal way of getting the job
> done, but I don't recall any other proposals which might be able to
> provide that sort of functionality.

imo a hack to generate the subtitle images and pipe these things to
bmovl is a lot harder to write than a proper standalone subtitle
renderer filter. anyway i'm tired of people writing ugly hacks to use
things for purposes they weren't meant for and obfuscating the code to
hell and making everything intertwined and interdependent because
they're too lazy or newb to write a little real code.. i'm guilty of
it too of course (see vf_harddup and softskip :) but that doesn't make
it ok. the underlying problem is that mplayer g1 is a pain to code
for, and writing ugly hacks is usually the only way to get stuff
done...

rich