[MPlayer-dev-eng] Subtitles

[The Wanderer]

D Richard Felker III wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 15, 2004 at 04:17:09PM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:
> 
>> D Richard Felker III wrote:

>>> 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.

You're probably quite right, I hadn't thought about it from that
direction before. I now have a slightly clearer picture of part of
MPlayer's architecture than I had before... which must be some kind of
improvement, I suppose.

Now that I think about it, the "missing feature" for which bmovl2 had
been proposed as a solution was DVD menus, not complex subtitles. I got
things mixed up in my head somewhere... this happens far too often.

> 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...

Acknowledged, and agreed, across the board. I'd thought of mentioning G2
in my original post, but wasn't sure the feature would be provided (or
readily provide-able) even there, so didn't go in that direction.

-- 
       The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

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