[MPlayer-users] BUG and small HOW-TO

[Andrzej Szelachowski]

Hi everyone,

I was not able to load subtitles with name other then *.avi’s file name using GUI. (MPlayer 1.0pre4)

and small HOW-TO

I had problems with displaying Central-European subtitles when using gmplayer. I was looking for some hints in MPlayer documentation but I found no ready-to-use solution. After some hours of playing with MPlayer GUI I discovered the following:

1) MPlayer looks for fonts in the following order:
* the font from preferences -> Font -> Font
* ~/.mplayer/subfont.ttf
* ~/.mplayer/font/
* /usr/share/mplayer/font
* /usr/share/mplayer/subfont.ttf

In the Slackware package which I download from linuxpackages.net there was only font with ISO-8859-2 encoding in /usr/share/mplayer/font. Because of that, adding fonts to /usr/share/mplayer/subfont.ttf was of no use because it was the last to be searched. (I wanted to play CP1250 subtitle)

2) Doesn’t matter: what type of font is used for displaying subtitles and how are encoded the subtitles

preferences -> Subtitle & OSD -> Subtitle -> Encoding

should be set to

"None"

3) In case of Mplayer’s fonts you don’t have to set anything in preferences -> Font -> Encoding,
The only important think is to make sure that MPlayer look for fonts in:
~/.mplayer/font/
or
/usr/share/mplayer/font
containing fonts with the same encoding as subtitles

4) In case of  *.ttf fonts, one has to make sure that MPlayer will find them first in accordance with the order given in point 1). Next we have to set proper encoding in preferences -> Font -> Encoding to be in line with encoding of subtitle file.

I think this is not very intuitive, and such information, if exists anywhere, is hardly findable.
Maybe my remarks can be published somewhere so that other don’t have to follow the same painful path as me??

What do you think??

best regards

Andrzej