[MPlayer-users] Mplayer Arabic Subtitles Rendering Issues with .ass Subtitles and Subtitles in general muxed in MKV

[totsoi san]

Hello.

It seems that mplayer unfortunately does not render arabic subtitles
correctly when they are in .ass format, or when subtitles are muxed
into MKV files. in those instances the arabic text appears from left
to right, with the letters disjointed.

However, when an SRT subtitle file is loaded with the video file via
the -sub command, mplayer renders the arabic script adequately (i.e.
from right to left, with letters joined).

Here is a link where I have posted the command lines I used with the
output, as well as posting links to pictures.
http://pastebin.ca/545759  . It also contains my config options.

I use Ubuntu 7.04, with mplayer version MPlayer 2:1.0~rc1-0ubuntu9
(the one from the repositories). I have compiled svn versions of
mplayer as recent as yesterday's, and the problem is still there. I
happen to use fribidi2 however, which supports arabic letter shaping
(i.e. connecting and joining the letters). I got the packages from
here http://www.khaledhosny.org/fribidi2_ubuntu , which work fine on
ubuntu feisty (7.04) despite them being compiled for edgy.

I suspect the issue lies with libass and the matroska muxer, as they
don't seem to call fribidi for rendering the subs. I'm not a
programmer though, so it's simply speculation.

It seems the issue isn't also confined to arabic, but extends to other
languages as well such as hebrew, where the text would be displayed
left to right. Here's a link I found through google:
http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-advusers/2006-August/001474.html


Can anyone look into this issue please? It would be really helpful to
fix it, not only to mplayer but also to other projects such as Aegisub
(an excellent subbing program, widely used by fansubber), which offers
the choice to use libass as one of the subtitle rendering libraries.

Thank you :)