[MPlayer-dev-eng] Re: Small changes to subreader.c file

[Adam Tlałka]

Dnia Mon, 10 Oct 2005 22:23:05 +0200, Guillaume POIRIER  
<poirierg at gmail.com> napisał:
> Hi Adam,
> My opinion about all this discussion is that ppl lost a great deal of
> time arguing over a very small, yet not so trivial issue.
That is true.

> we all agree that :
>   - hardware players are broken (which is probably why I've never been
> able to watch SRT subs on my crappy hw player)
Many of them just do not read any subtitles not in DVD format.
But there are many too which read SRT or other type of subtitle file  
properly.
My player starts in 1 second after switching the power on
and reads SRT subtitles just fine. It is not a full feature one as
MPlayer program is and is limited to a few formats but from my point of  
view
is good enough. My three years old son can use it without any assistance.
As I said before cr/lf format is even mentioned in some technical docs
of hardware player - some Philips but I don't remember the model.

>  - some software players are broken
which? those sticking to original subtitle file format developed with  
Windows
programs or MPlayer like using proprietary system specific type of text  
files.
These means that MPlayer under Windows and MPlayer under Linux produce
different subtitle file output. If this is not true that is against  
presented
by Richard logic. Now write this on CD and try with different systems
or with hardware players. It's just misunderstanding. File on CD doesn't  
belong
to particular operating system so format should be the same.
 From historical, compatibility and for h/w player case reasons it should  
stay
as cr/lf as it appeared.

>   - the original "format" of SRT used CR/LF mostly because it was
> developed on windows platform
It was developed and it is constantly used on this platform.

>   - MPlayer is feature rich and could afford yet another option to
> generate CR/LF formatted SRT files.
It is not a big trouble to do this of course but is it really needed to be
an option? Look at my example with CD or DVD. Which system it belongs to?
Any! So format should be one and this historically developed one works
properly with all players and systems. MPlayer reads it correctly of course
so there is no problem here.

> Adam, as Richard said earlier, if you could make a _good_ patch that
> allow to _optionnaly_ generate CR/LF SRT files, it has a great chance
> to get merged.
Patch - OK. _optionally_ - I sugest strongly rethink the case.
Ritchard says about native text files and it is his only one argument.
Examples, compatibility, historical reasons and goal for which these files
was designed to means nothing to him.

> As you saw, that issue is controversial, so my feeling is that it does
> legitimate to give ppl a choice to generate CR/LF SRT files.
It is not very controversial is you judge all of the argumentation.
The program is created to be usable and to produce the most usable format.
In this case it seems to be cr/lf one.

Regards
-- 
Adam Tlałka      mailto:atlka at pg.gda.pl    ^v^ ^v^ ^v^
System  & Network Administration Group           ~~~~~~
Computer Center,  Gdańsk University of Technology, Poland
PGP public key:   finger atlka at sunrise.pg.gda.pl