Position subtitles on black borders in full screen

[jon222]

Hi,
Feature: position subtitles on black borders in full screen outside(under) the movie picture.
Just like in MPC player, this would be really great and convenient, especially for the VLC for OSX.
So in the next release?

[Devore]

This is already semi-possible, but not in a general way you'd want.

The problem is, as is explained whenever this comes up, is that VLC only knows about the area of the screen that has the picture, and that's its "canvas", it can't paint outside it. Hence, subtitles can only be drawn in the picture area.

But, you can extend the canvas by using the cropadd video filter (under Preferences, All, Video, Filters, Cropadd. If you have a video file that has a picture 1280x532, and want it shown full screen on a 16:9 display (1920x1080), you can pad 94 pixels on the top and bottom. Move your subtitles down using the assigned hotkeys, and voila.

The obvious problem is that this only works for movies with this exact resolution, so has to be reset each time you want to play a different one. Not usable. Since the capability is there, it might be possible to write a plugin or something to set it automatically based on the details of the file being played. Or even better, add a feature to VLC that does this, and allow it to be linked to a hotkey. Honestly, all my other video players already do this, kmplayer, potplayer, smplayer/mplayer, but I'm "married" to VLC because I am a creature of habit, and it's a shame this is something people been asking for for years.

....

There is a "canvas" filter, which I thought would do that, allow me to set the canvas to 1920x1080, but instead it seems to just do weird things with the aspect ratio, and I can't figure out exactly what it is supposed to be doing.