I'm not sure if doubling up line terminators in SSA is legal, but I've noticed that mplayer appears to only count the first \N encountered as a line terminator when two are placed together. eg. "line1\N\Nline3" will display: line1 \Nline3 might be intended behaivor, or a bug. other SSA interpreters I've used seem to count each \N as a line terminator, so \N\N will result in a blank line between two lines of text. -- robh