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

[Evgeniy Stepanov]

On Thursday 07 June 2007, totsoi san wrote:
> 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.

Exactly.

> 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.htm
>l
>
>
> 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.

It requires significant changes in libass. They will be done sometime, but I 
can't tell you when. Could you send the subtitle file you used for those 
screenshots ?