[MPlayer-users] Subtitles in an avi file

[Vladimir Niksic]

> 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.

Just a few minutes after I mailed the mailing list, I remebmered to 
search gmane for the same problem. I found a mail or two, maybe you were 
involved in the discussions, and also found the small source code. This 
is one binary I'll keep.

> 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?

That's a great idea. A lot of people don't like the idea of having a 
seperate file for subtitles, but refuse to use ogm, or something similar 
that actually supports this feature, and not this dirty hack.

> 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.

I completely agree, it's a really dumb way to put in subtitles, and 
should be avoided by all encoders.

> 
> 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. ^_^

I probably won't do that, because most of the material they have up 
there is already encoded like this, so they probably won't respond well 
to someone complaing about it out of the blue. I'm pretty happy with the 
existance of this small program, because it works great.