[MPlayer-dev-eng] Utilize libunrar.so/unrar.dll?

[The Wanderer]

Rich Felker wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 22, 2005 at 01:29:26PM +0800, Zuxy wrote:
> 
>> 2005/10/22, Rich Felker <dalias at aerifal.cx>:
>> 
>>> I'm against supporting win32 dlls too, but especially against
>>> this 'feature' which (unlike win32 codec support) is totally
>>> useless. If people want to play these subs they can just use the
>>> external unrar binary first.
>> 
>> Firstly, whether it's useless to all or not doesn't come from your
>> imagination. Most DVDRips are tuned to have a size that just fits
>> into a 700MB CD-R, and if you don't rar the subs you have to
>> overburn a lot.
> 
> Then unrar it and recompress with rar2 (which is already supported)
> or gzip or anything else.. Or (much better idea) OCR it and rm the
> shitty vobsubs and replace them with a text sub format.

This is not necessarily "better". It is possible to do things with
VOBsubs which are not readily possible, and perhaps outright impossible,
with at least some text sub formats - the first and most obvious
candidate being, use specialized symbols which are not necessarily going
to be present in any available font. (Using a specific font, and/or
multiple specific fonts for specific points, is another issue.) From
personal experience, it appears (at least with the only text-sub format
I looked into, though I have no reason to expect any of the others to be
any different) to be very difficult verging on impossible to have two
blocks of text on-screen simultaneously which appear in different
locations (in the instance I looked at, bottom left and bottom right of
the screen) and are both left-justified in the place at which they
appear; I can imagine a number of other possible failure scenarios as
well, but I'd rather not go over them without first confirming that they
do in fact behave the way I'd expect them to.

(The "unrar and recompress it" suggestion is not necessarily a bad one,
but just because it's what I do, a couple of counterarguments: is
everyone who might want to do so necessarily going to have a tool
installed which is capable of compressing to rar2? and is rar2
necessarily going to be able to compress the files to a comparable
degree, or is there a notable chance that the recompressed files will be
notably larger than the originals?)

-- 
       The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.