[MEncoder-users] Generating switchable binary subtitles with MEncoder

[Giacomo Comes]

On Tue, Oct 30, 2007 at 10:10:36AM +0200, Francois Visagie wrote:
> On 10/29/07, Giacomo Comes <comes at naic.edu> wrote:
> > On Mon, Oct 29, 2007 at 06:53:54PM +0200, Francois Visagie wrote:
> > >
> > > 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
> >
> > Can you clarify what you mean with "it adjusts the timing"?
> > What spumux does that you want to disable?
> 
> DATECODE values have 1-second precision and are stored once a second.
> The ripped DATECODE subtitles are 1s long each. When displayed as text
> subtitles, this creates the appearance of a persistent, smoothly
> updating date/time read-out. However spumux shortens the subtitles a
> little to prevent adjacency, which is exactly what I didn't want since
> that causes a flashing effect.

Try this patch http://encode2mpeg.sourceforge.net/testpatch/patch_dvdauthor0.6.14_raw
and use spumux with the option -d, it should do what you need.
Please let me know if it works well or you have some troubles.
Because this is not related to MPlayer, you can answer me offlist.

Giacomo

> >
> > > 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.
> >
> > The code in spumux that render text subtitles in graphic subtitles
> > comes from mplayer. So basically both should do the same work.
> > About anti-aliasing, what I know is that it requires a lot of colors.
> > ImageMagick when it renders a one color text with anti-aliasing can use
> > up to 256 different colors. The rendering looks very nice, but then
> > if you put it in a DVD subtitle you cannot have more that 4
> > colors in total. How do you keep the anti-alias effect if you can only
> > use 1 or may be 2 colors for the text and 1 or 2 for the border?
> > I suspect that MPlayer use anti-alias and it looks nice because when
> > it displays the subtitle on screen it can use as many colors as it needs.
> >
> > But I may be totally wrong on this as I'm not an anti-alias expert.
> > If what I'm saying is incorrect I hope somebody else can correct me.
> 
> In my view you're on the right track here. When hard-coding subtitles
> a program can proverbially take all the time and colours in the world.
> Having said that, I know for a fact that spumux only uses two colours.
> MaestroSBT uses colours better and produces better quality DVD
> subtitles, but I still have to find a way to mux those into the
> dvdauthor project with unaltered timing.
> 
> Kind regards,
> Francois