[MPlayer-users] Mencoder and transparent subtitles, again

[Loren Merritt]

On Sun, 18 Apr 2004, Eddie  wrote:

> I am having a big problem encoding subtitles when I use mencoder to
> encode DVDs to Divx.
> I made a script that I can bulk encode vob files, 100 eps at a time,
> using the 3 pass encoding. It video quality is great, but the subtitles
> are transparent.  Yes I copy off the IFO file from the DVD and it helps,
> but still transparent.
>
> What can I do to tweak this? If I copy off the vobsub then re-encode
> it, will I get better quality?
> How about an OGM?
> Can I tweak the source code? I don't know C, but I can sort of read it.
> Can someone tell me where to look?
>
> Any other suggestions?
> Thank you
> Eddie

That's a limitation of MPlayer's OSD: It can only display transparent
white text with black borders.

The best quality would be to OCR the subtitles into SRT or the like (and
maybe mux into OGM or Matroska). It doesn't take long, but you can't
really automate it. I haven't seen a decent non-interactive OCR program.
Almost as good is to leave the subtitles as sub/idx files (or mux then
into Matroska).

Either way, the viewer can choose display settings at runtime, and you
don't add compression artifacts around the subtitles like you would when
hardsubbed.

--Loren Merritt