[Mplayer-dvb] Implementing DVB subtitling

[Dave Chapman]

Nico wrote:
> Harri Forsgren wrote:
> 
>> Hi
>>
>> I've been writing a small library for parsing and rendering DVB 
>> subtitles. It can be downloaded from
>>
>> http://koti.mbnet.fi/hforsgre/libdvbsub/libdvbsub.tar.gz
>>
>> It would be nice for us finns and others, who don't have to suffer of 
>> dubbing and don't understand all languages on earth, to be able to 
>> have working DVB subtitling in mplayer. However I have very limited 
>> knowledge about mplayer's internals. So I thought if someone else 
>> could write/aid on writing the mplayer part of subtitling.
>>
> the demuxer already pushes sub packets to the appropriate fifo 
> (demuxer->subs), but it needs some small
> and easy additions: (page index and some other); the main problem is that
> the subs fifo isn't treated like all the others: it's hardwired to the 
> dvd subs; this is the reason why showing
> other subs types is a real nightmare/challenge in mplayer.
> In order to show DVB subs it's necessary to clean that code and make the 
> fifo usable, IMHO.

Yes, I have looked at adding DVB subtitles to mplayer, and this part of 
mplayer is just not designed to be extended.

As an workaround for my dvbtextsubs program (which decodes DVB teletext 
subtitles - as opposed to the bitmap-based DVB Subtitles), I added an 
option to output a ".srt" file.  This doesn't work for live viewing, but 
it does mean you can view subtitles for recordings.

A very useful ability would be to incorporate some kind of OCR into your 
library so that it outputs the text from the subtitles in one of the 
many standard subtitle formats that mplayer supports.

At the very worse, you would need to train it for the font used by each 
broadcaster, but I'm sure you would get volunteers to help with that.

Dave.