[MEncoder-users] Generating switchable binary subtitles with MEncoder

[Francois Visagie]

On 10/29/07, Nicolas George <nicolas.george at normalesup.org> wrote:
> L'octidi 8 brumaire, an CCXVI, Giacomo Comes a écrit:
> > spumux (part of dvdauthor) is able to convert text subtitles to spu format
> > since forever. After uou have them in spu format you can extract them to
> > vobsub format if you like.
>
> I mentioned spumux, but I also mentioned that it does not handle font
> subtleties: you can not have italic, for example.

Also, the whole reason I hoped to turn to MEncoder for encoding binary
subtitles was because I got turned off spumux (I am actually using
dvdauthor for authoring). The reasons in my case were 1) unless you
provide it with SSA subtitles, it adjusts the timing with no way of
disabling that behaviour (and I'm recreating DV DATECODE display which
depends on perfectly adjacent subtitles to prevent flashing) and 2) it
doesn't do anti-aliasing. In fact it only seems to use text and border
colours, possibly in addition to background which is transparent of
course.

So I'm looking for a way of generating high-quality anti-aliased
binary subtitles for muxing in as switchable subtitles outside of
dvdauthor, and I had hoped it was possible to dump binary subtitles
generated by MEncoder into a file. They are so beautiful... I know
there are hosts of Windows subtitle utilities around, all with their
different input and output formats and abilities and idiosyncrasies to
learn, what a schlep...

Regards,
Francois