[MPlayer-dev-eng] Slideshow

[Anders Johansson]

Hi,

> Hi folks,
> 
> For a real-life purpose, I needed to hack together a slide-show ripper for
> mplayer. A slideshow synopsis of a movie is a sequence of frames that have
> subtitles on them (one frame for each sub). Such slideshow synopses were
> actually quite popular in my childhood and they do provide for an enjoyable
> experience of the movie. Arguably, a full-resolution slideshow can sometimes
> be more enjoyable than a poor-quality over-compressed low-res movie.
> 
> A group of kids (5 and 6 yrs old) really enjoyed such a slideshow compiled
> from SW Episode II (I *DO* own the DVD, so it was "fair use" as far as I am
> concerned :-). They might have not understand half of the movie if just
> played for them. This way, however, complete with live storytelling, the
> slideshow brings movies closer to kids and to the traditional ways of
> telling a story in a kindergarten environment, which is something today's
> kids often miss. (insert your favorite rant about the degrading verbal and
> literacy skills of today's youth :-).
> 
> So much for the justification.
> 
> Now back to business. I think, it would be a nice feature to add to mplayer,
> and I think, I can clean up the dirty hack I have written to do the same
> thing (that is to export a sequence of pictures with subtitles on them) in a
> more civilized fashion.
> 
> My question to the list is, how would you guys like this feature to work?
> Where would you put it -- into mplayer or mencoder? I'd propose to make it
> one of the subtitle-ripping options of mencoder. Whaddaya think?

This functionality is related to slow motion and should therefore
(IMHO) be implemented in a flexible way in libmpcodecs so it is
available both for mplayer and mencoder.

//Anders