[mythtv-users] Re: MPlayer Occasional Subtitles

[Stephen Tait]

>
>if by 'rendered' you mean the subtitles have actually be stuck onto the 
>picture and are not pulled from a file or anything, then no, this is not 
>the case. in the godfather films and kill bill (at least the uk, pal 
>versions that i own), these subtitles are displayed dynamically. in other 
>words, if i were to rip the dvd without bothering to set something up to 
>catch subtitles, then they wouldn't be in my rip.

OK, that's exceptionally odd!

I'm a UK/PAL guy myself, but don't have any DVD's like this to test - a 
friend of mine has Kill Bill so I might borrowate it and see if I can 
figure out what's going on. The fact that you can use Xine to change the 
text must mean it's in there as an ASCII stream somewhere - again, this is 
something I've never heard of in DVD's, as I wasn't aware that standalone 
players supported it. All my DVD rips have SRT subs in them, which are 
OCR'd from the VOB sub files. When they get chucked in an MPEG4 capable 
player, you don't get subtitles.


>xine shows them, and i can change the fon't they appear in, so they're not 
>rendered on :-) it's just mplayer that doesn't. there must be something 
>quite clever going on, because none of the subtitle tracks are just those 
>bits (i.e. subtitles must be turned on & off while you watch or 
>something). standalone dvd players (and xine) are obviously sophisticated 
>enough to handle this, mplayer is not.

Have you checked *all* of the subtitle streams? Have you tried taking a VOB 
exploder of some description to the disc to see what it turns up?

Evidently there's a large hole in my DVD knowledge somewhere.


>maybe i'll just use xine instead. that way i'll get dvd menus too (and 
>avoid the 'always plays track1 chapter1' problem). is there any reason why 
>using xine would be a worse idea? why do people generally prefer mplayer 
>with myth?

Personally, I'm much happier with Xine. As well as the menus (which are a 
godsend - our house must have half of the BBC's archive on DVD), I find it 
much easier to use and configure (you can always hop into the GUI menu with 
the mouse if need be). Plus I think the OSD looks nicer with Xine (but this 
is probabaly because I didn't spend any time configuring my mPlayer 
interface). Playback seems identical to mplayer in terms of quality and CPU 
usage. There might be the issue of getting Real/WMV/ASF streams to play 
back on Xine, but I don't have any to try it out with.