[MPlayer-dev-eng] Proposed support for Kate streams

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 10:20:03PM +0100, Reimar Döffinger wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 11:04:57PM +0200, Ivan Kalvachev wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 10:00 PM, Reimar Döffinger
> > <Reimar.Doeffinger at stud.uni-karlsruhe.de> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 06:44:26PM +0000, ogg.k.ogg.k at googlemail.com wrote:
> > >  > I've patched MPlayer to support Kate streams in Ogg and Matroska containers.
> > >  > Kate is a text codec (for subtitles, etc). More information can be found there:
> > >  > http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/OggKate
> > >  >
> > >  > Note that the support is just as simple text subtitles (eg, none of the motions,
> > >  > regions, styles are supported (yet)).
> > >  >
> > >  > For reference, here's the current patch, but against a svn version a few days
> > >  > old already.
> > >  >
> > >  > Would you be interested in this ?
> > >
> > >  Sorry for being offensive, but I would prefer to wait and hope it dies
> > >  out before it ever gets used much, since it extremely smells like
> > >  another case of NIH-syndrome caused by too much use of Ogg.
> > >  Esp. considering this at the wiki:
> > >  "I found other formats, such as USF (designed for inclusion in Matroska)
> > >  and various subtitle formats, but none were designed for embedding
> > >  inside an Ogg container."
> > >  Which in my ears screams: "Lets reinvent the wheel instead of
> > >  fixing/improving Ogg container".
> > 
> > Does this mean that the main design goal is these subtitles to be
> > almost unusable without ogg?
> 
> I think the design not so much, the implementation in MPlayer is more of
> a problem though, since the "decoding" is done in the demuxers (support
> for ogg and mkv is added), instead of in mp_common.h.
> Probably because demux_ogg still uses the old and broken way of setting
> subtitles (modifying vo_sub directly instead of creating a proper
> subtitle stream).

And I also forgot: this means that your patch might be much less helpful
than you think, since I intend to make the libavformat demuxer the
default over our one rather sooner than later, and I am rather convinced
that the FFmpeg developers will not accept a demuxer using an external library
like libkate (or what you call it, btw. I think the naming is quite
unfortunate since it collides with the name of a KDE editor, luckily so
far they have only a libkatepart.so, still seems risky to me though).
Which means it would have to be redone to move the decoding in
mpcommon.c or it would only work with an explicit "-demuxer ogg" then.

Greetings,
Reimar Döffinger