Advanced SSA and ASS subtitle support?

everything is possible - it just needs someone with time and interest enough to do it.

and no, currently it doesn't handle it, but as you say, it probably isn't too hard to implement if someone wants to give it a go.

ssa format tag support might be better imho.

because srt does not design for any text formatting but ssa the format tag was included in its spec. and the dev can borrow the code from vobsub (project guliverkli)

ssa specs:
http://www.matroska.org/technical/specs/...s/ssa.html

project guliverkli
http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/

that whould be awesome... :bowdown:

subs ripped from dvd have lots of italics, on regular dvd players it looks horrible,

srt is more popular and easyer to edit the subs and probally to code too since it has only to add the <i> tag... ssa has lots of options

hi,
would it be possible for advanced subtitle options to be implemented?
some of the newer, better done subtitles have styling implemented to suit the show/movie/etc. would it be possible to implement support for this into xbmc?
as is, xbmc ignores the special tags altogether (which is better than showing the code in the subtitle or not showing anything).

here are some screencaptures of both xbmc and media player classic (with directvobsub).

xbmc:


mpc:


and this is what that line looks like in notepad:

Quote:104
00:10:05,280 --> 00:10:08,680
103,0,normal,,0000,0000,0000,,we are not pals,\nwe are partners in fate!

(images hosted by imageshack)

thanks for your consideration
morien

fyi, it sounds as if robert ramiega <jedi at plukwa.net > is looking (or is going to look) into 'advanced' subtitle attributes for mplayer so you might want to contact him if you are a c/c++ programmer and you can (or want to try to) help him. ps! you might want to suggest to him that he looks at media player classic's subreader source code as it seems to support italics, bold, colors and font-styles, etc.

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)

(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:

i had a look at ffdshow sources (thanks for e-mail btw ) 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).

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.

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: