Advanced SSA and ASS subtitle support?
#16
my patch does the oposite (strips some formating tags from subtitles). primary reason to do this was watching some tv series on xbox and those extra tags started to annoy me.
i've tried to understand how mplayer deals with subs and can't realy figure it out. so far there is no reaction to my mail from mplayer-devs. thanks for the hint with mpc sources but i'm afraid reading subtitles and rendering them is quite different between mpc and mplayer. so not much help from there.
thanks to that someone who submitted my patch to sf tracker =o)
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#17
Sad 
(idej @ sep. 08 2005,11:31 Wrote:thanks for the hint with mpc sources but i'm afraid reading subtitles and rendering them is quite different between mpc and mplayer.
what about ffdshow source code?, it too got the capabilities to display ssa and srt subtitle attributes, ...though like mpc the ffdshow source code is in c++ :oops:
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#18
i had a look at ffdshow sources (thanks for e-mail btw Smile ) and it's just as i thought. both ffdshow and mpc might be helpfull to design good interpreter of subtitles. this is one part of the task. the other is to rewrite subtitle part of mplayer so it will know what to do with all the stuff it got from subtitle module. as of now (and as far as i could understand the code) there is no way of passing info on f.ex style (italic, bold etc) to rendering module. it needs to be redesigned (at least partially). i think that all this needs to be done upstream. i'm biased tho because i've some limited experience in unix developement while xbox developement is terra incognita for me (after quick browsing xbmc's mplayer sources f.ex. i don't understand how it can use ttf fonts.... maybe some directx magic? from what i figured for now ttf fonts are needed to render italics or bold).
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#19
some features regarding subtitles which are missing in xbmc (at least, i think they are) are mentioned in this topic. if one or more of the following points is already supported, then i must apologise because i couldn't find them.

for some examples about the features that i mention, you should check out media player classic or directvobsub.

screen alignment
currently, xbox media center forces the subtitles centered, in the lower part of the screen. it would be nice to align them to the left/right instead of centering them. for completeness, it might also support vertical alignment (bottom, center, top) in combination with the already mentioned horizontal alignment (left, center, right). vertical alignment is currently only supported by manually changing it with screen calibration.

screen margins
four parameters (top, bottom, left, right of the screen) should be independently adjustable to control the margins. subtitles cannot get rendered past any marge and will be wrapped instead.

adjust the border style of the subtitles
two modes: outline and opaque box
outline: renders black lines around the letters (like it is done now), allows one to adjust the border width and shadow depth (0 = disabled).
opaque box: renders a black frame behind the letters so the text is easier to read in some situations.

extra subtitle color support
the ability to specify the primary and secondary colors of the subtitles, and the colors of the outline and shadow.

underline support
currently, bold and italics are supported. maybe it's possible to add underline support?

amount of space between letters
sets the number of pixels between every character. can be a positive or a negative value (negative=letters closer to each other than normal).

like i said: i took these ideas from directvobsub and media player classic. if you want an example on how they look/work, you should check out these great programs. it would be nice if these ideas were incorporated into xbox media center to make the subtitle-system more complete.

if you read this far, thanks for hearing me out. Smile



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#20
i thought that i would post this here just really to get confirmation one way or the other if this would actually be possible.

would it actually be possible for xbmc to decode and display the full array of features within the ssa/ass format?

what i mean by this is features like colours, typesetting and karaoke. at the moment it would seem to me like xbmc is converting ssa/ass to srt and displaying them without formatting.

i understand that this may not be possible due to the limitation of ram available as the already poor 64mb is shared between the system and the video, and i'm sure that to overlay the graphics would take a certain amount of memory.

i use xbmc for everything that i can but recently lots of the files that i have been watching are using ssa/ass with advanced features that require me to route them through my pc.

if somebody within the development tree could let me know if this would be possible. :bowdown:
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#21
talk to the mplayer guys as we use their subrender code.
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#22
are there any plans for ass subtitle files to support font and formatting data? a lot of mkv files are packed with these subtitles as well as the font, and xbmc has trouble displaying them right now.



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#23
a small bump for my idea.
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#24
i'd definitely go for the subtitle wrapping and user defined positioning. i have a good bit trouble with subs getting cut off, since i tend to bump the sub size up a good bit (small tv :tear: ). for me the other features wouldn't be so critical but would be a nice to have.
another soft sub feature that i'd like that xbmc doesn't seem to handle are sign or effect subtitles (ones that are meant to be located somewhere other than the default dialogue line, like in the pic below) everything gets displayed down in the dialogue line with a bunch of "\n"'s and other characters.

Image



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#25
I also believe this is an important feature for the developer to look into and if possible, make it. Right now, if i am using plain regular .srt or .sub files, there would be no outline. And its tremedously hard to see the subtitles since the subtitle blends in w/ the background.
I also think it'd be cool if the user can set the amount of character on one line. Say if line is > 54 characters, then it automatically outputs it into 2 lines instead of one.
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#26
In the latest MPlayer for Linux CVS/SVN there is now support for advanced SSA/ASS subtitles, hopefully some time after XBMC 2.0.0 released a developer with update MPlayer in XBMC with the latest MPlayer and include the library for that, (that library is called libass by the way). Sorry can't give you guys an E.T.A. on when XBMC 2.0.0 will be released, nor when a developer with update MPlayer in XBMC after that, so please don't ask for a date or "when?".
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#27
Just posting to say that this would be a fantastic addition to XBMC as .ass subtitles are being increasingly popular with the rise of .mkv format anime fansubs.

For straight dialogue it doesn't matter much, you just lose out on the subbers choice of fonts, sizes, colours etc.
Image Image

But when fansubbers start using some more advanced features to position text around the screen it just becomes a mess on XBMC.
Image Image

.ass subs work fine on the Windows v1.0rc1 Mplayer build using -ass, which gives me hope that this is possible for XBMC.
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#28
Star 
Given that significant work is likely to be done in regards to MPlayer, will the developers be attempting to get libass (which is now part of the mplayer project) working so that XBMC will have subtitles close to on par with what's produced by vsfilter in windows?
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#29
yea i'll probably try to get it working in dvdplayer for us.
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#30
I'm glad to hear it. That's been my only complaint while trying to watch fansubbed anime on my TV. Smile
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