[MPlayer-users] Subtitles in an avi file

[The Wanderer]

Vladimir Niksic wrote:

> I downloaded some anime that has a very interesting way of putting
> subtitles in it. The audio is japanese, so I need the subtitles. I've
>  read on the site that the subtitles are in the file and complex 
> instructions how to view them in windows.

This one again...

The only known solution to this problem, aside from using a player which
is both able and willing to support something so broken, is (as you've
discovered) to extract the subtitles to a separate file and tell MPlayer
to use that as the subtitle file. There is a program, written for me by
an MPlayer developer some time ago, which can do that automatically; the
source is attached.

I wonder if we shouldn't make this available somewhere else, so that I
don't have to keep posting it every time someone asks about the issue?

<snip>

> This is a bit garbled up now, because of the newline breaking, but
> I've seen this kind of subtitles before, although in a seperate file.
> :-)
> 
> When I literally paste out the plain-text subtitles in a seperate
> file, and run Mplayer with -sub option the subtitles work great.
> They're synced, and very well timed.
> 
> Can I play these subtitles "on the fly" without being required to 
> exctract 20 kb of plain text in a seperate file just to play it with
> subtitles? I can't seem to find anything in the manual about this.

The reason why you cannot do this is because the part of MPlayer which
handles that type of subtitle expects to be given a file to get them
from, instead of a location in memory. Short of extensive code
duplication, which seems like a bad idea, I'm not sure how support for
this sort of mess could be added - and since it's such a bad idea to
begin with (if you want to add a nonstandard subtitle stream to AVI
files, do it as a properly interleaved stream, not as a single
contiguous block in an unrelated format at the end of the file!
...sorry, rant) I don't think MPlayer is likely to support it any time
in the foreseeable future.

My primary recommendation, aside from the above, is to avoid supporting
people who use this form of soft subtitles, and to Email the people who
make the software that actually does the work and complain to them about
it. I take no responsibility for what kind of replies you might get,
however. ^_^

-- 
       The Wanderer

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

A government exists to serve its citizens, not to control them.
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