[MPlayer-users] When will there be a new release?

[Attila Kinali]

On Wed, 15 Oct 2008 20:48:44 +0200
Nicolas George <nicolas.george at normalesup.org> wrote:

> Le quartidi 24 vendémiaire, an CCXVII, Attila Kinali a écrit :
> > -ass uses fontconfig.
> 
> That is true from the programmer's point of view. But from the user's point
> of view, that is irrelevant.

It might be irrelevant from the user's point of few, but it does
matter never the less. Unless you are one of those users who
think that electricity comes out of the wall socket and
potatoes grow in the cellar.

> > Uhmm.. libass doesn't render any fonts. It's still freetype that does
> > that. What you are merely doing is to select a different font, nothing else.
> 
> Subtitles rendering does not stop after glyphs rasterization: the glyphs
> still needs to be outlined and composited into the video. I find the
> outlining much nicer with libass, since it allows finer configuration and
> shadows with an alpha channel.

Ah.. ok. sorry.
 
> As for the compositing, the subtitles rendered by the standard OSD mechanism
> are somewhat transparent: very saturated colors, especially red, show
> through the white areas. I find that distracting.

You can tweak the transparency, and the border width of the 
text subtitles. The colours are a differnet matter alltoghether.

You have to know that the text subtitle system was written
in 2001 or 2002, where speed was everything. So even the subtitle
rendering optimized for it. Ie, it rendered only the luminance
and no colour. This safes around 50% of performance for the
subrendering. Ofcourse, today PCs are a lot faster and it doesn't
matter as much anymore, that's why libass does render colours too.
But the old text sub was never changed.

If you want to have more options in how to tweak text subs,
please feel free to send a patch.

> > Uhg.. You must have smoked something heavy to recomend
> > others to enable software scaling, because no computer is fast
> > enough for software scaling, unless you are watching a thumb nail.
> 
> You may be a little late on the modern computers' speed. My box was
> reasonably good two years ago, but nowadays, a Core2 at 2 GHz is quite
> common, and it can perfectly do software scaling for my 1920×1200 screen for
> all the videos I watch and still have CPU time left. I do not think that
> 1920×1200 qualifies as thumbnail, and neither do the videos I watch.

You may be a little late on the modern video files cpu and i/o demands.
If you have ever watched a 720p or 1080p h.264 file, then you know that
even a 3GHz machine can get at its limits even though it is using hardware
scaling.

And yes, such files are already common.

				Attila Kinali
-- 
If you want to walk fast, walk alone.
If you want to walk far, walk together.
		-- African proverb