[MPlayer-dev-eng] Slideshow

[Daniel A. Nagy]

Hi folks,

For a real-life purpose, I needed to hack together a slide-show ripper for
mplayer. A slideshow synopsis of a movie is a sequence of frames that have
subtitles on them (one frame for each sub). Such slideshow synopses were
actually quite popular in my childhood and they do provide for an enjoyable
experience of the movie. Arguably, a full-resolution slideshow can sometimes
be more enjoyable than a poor-quality over-compressed low-res movie.

A group of kids (5 and 6 yrs old) really enjoyed such a slideshow compiled
from SW Episode II (I *DO* own the DVD, so it was "fair use" as far as I am
concerned :-). They might have not understand half of the movie if just
played for them. This way, however, complete with live storytelling, the
slideshow brings movies closer to kids and to the traditional ways of
telling a story in a kindergarten environment, which is something today's
kids often miss. (insert your favorite rant about the degrading verbal and
literacy skills of today's youth :-).

So much for the justification.

Now back to business. I think, it would be a nice feature to add to mplayer,
and I think, I can clean up the dirty hack I have written to do the same
thing (that is to export a sequence of pictures with subtitles on them) in a
more civilized fashion.

My question to the list is, how would you guys like this feature to work?
Where would you put it -- into mplayer or mencoder? I'd propose to make it
one of the subtitle-ripping options of mencoder. Whaddaya think?

-- 
Daniel

PS: I love open source! How else would I have been able to accomplish such a
task in one afternoon, without the source code and all the free tools? Many
thanks to the developer team!