[MPlayer-users] Subtitles rendering

[D Richard Felker III]

On Mon, Aug 25, 2003 at 11:58:48PM +0100, Luis Marques wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> Hello.
> 
> MPlayer seems to render the subtitles before scaling the video. That means 
> that its amazingly beautiful subtitles are not so amazing when the video has 
> a really low resolution.
> 
> Can't subtitles be rendered after video scaling? Maybe as an option if that 
> proves to be a performance pit. The question here is mostly because of low 
> res video which shouldn't be, I assume, as resource intensive to scale as 
> high res video so one option could be to set a maximum resolution for 
> post-scaling rendering to take effect.

If you use software scaler or a vo driver with accelerated subtitles,
then yes, you can draw subtitles after scaling. For instance, just
try:

mplayer low_res_movie.avi -vf scale=640:-2

Keep in mind that scaling in software is rather slow, so IMO you
should just scale the movie up enough to make subtitles look good,
then let the hardware scaler do the rest of getting it to fullscreen.

> Still on the subject of subtitles, that reminds me: the position slider can 
> only place the subtitles on top of the video image. But when in full screen, 
> I'd like to be able to take advantage of the black borders of the video on 
> top and bellow to place subtitles. It would be great if the subtitles could 
> be set to those positions too.

Use -vf expand to add borders and the subtitles can be positioned down
there.

> And why not maybe just dragging subtitles to position them?

Because mplayer is not fundamentally a gui app and really doesn't even
use the mouse.

> This was meant to be about the subtitles scaling but while I'm at it, one 
> little thing I dislike in MPlayer is the way the fullscreen option operates. 
> When I press the F key I'd like it to place the video on the screen, just it. 
> But it not only does that but it also starts playing it. Same thing when 
> returning to windowed mode. Also, I usually have to click two times in the 
> video window for the player GUI to disappear. It's probably debatable whether 
> the GUI should disappear immediately when I press F but please don't make me 
> have to click two times. Why two? To select the video window first? It seems 
> unresponsive. Same thing with Alt-Tab.

The GUI sucks; it's a known issue. Run mplayer from the command line
and it will work a lot better.

> Other than this issues MPlayer is really amazing!
> 
> I've seen you've done a good work correcting some problems of video flickering 
> and performance loss when other windows overlapped the video window. That was 
> a bugger too.
> 
> Have fun.

Yep.

Rich