The VideoLAN Forums

Hi, I have the following two problems with VLC 1.0. I'm running it in OS X 10.5.7, Macbook 2,1 (Core2Duo 2.0GHz 2GB).

(1) Font effect issue. I looked at the source code and found that VLC for Mac always renders subtitle fonts in regular style which is not very legible especially for east asian languages. Even if a user selects bold face, it will be ignored. This issue was introduced since version 0.9 and should be fixed in the future releases.

(2) Font encoding issue. I am having a trouble in changing the subtitle encoding at "Subtitles & OSD > Default Encoding" menu. When I change the Default Encoding to my preferred encoding (Korean EUC-KR/CP949), VLC always resets it to "Auto" which won't display Korean subtitles correctly. If any one has a solution, please let me know.

Thanks,

show the advanced settings and go under Input/codecs -> Other codecs -> Subtitles and set the subtitles text encoding there. uncheck utf-8 subtitles autodetection and uncheck formatted subtitles.

under Video -> Subtitles/OSD, pick the Freetype2 font renderer.

for the Subpictures filter module check the freetype2 font renderer checkbox.

under Video -> Subtitles/OSD -> Text renderer, select the asian font file, probably something like /Library/Fonts/#korean.dfont .
set the color, font size, and font effect to your liking.

For issue 1: You could take a look at font such as Arial Unicode MS, which is considered almost "unicode complete", in that it implements the characters of most (all?) writing scripts in the unicode specificaiton.

For issue 2: Another solution is just to convert your subtitle files to use UTF-8. I am not sure if the byte order mark is necessary.

For issue 1: You could take a look at font such as Arial Unicode MS, which is considered almost "unicode complete", in that it implements the characters of most (all?) writing scripts in the unicode specificaiton.

Yeah, one might try some fonts that use thicker glyphs (e.g., Arial Black) for a workaround for this issue. But, that didn't work for Korean fonts that came with Leopard (and Tiger too). Those fonts display English characters with thicker glyphs, but won't do the same for Korean characters. I guess that is because Korean substitution for those fonts do not exist, thus the default font (such as AppleGothic) is used instead. I captured four screenshots showing this issue in detail. For all of them, I used the Text Renderer set to "Default" and the Default Encoding set to "Auto" in Leopard (10.5.7 Intel).

[Screen 1] font: Arial Black / subtitle encoding: CP949 / characters shown on the screen: English

http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/4656/ari ... 949eng.jpg

[Screen 2] font: Arial Black / subtitle encoding: CP949 / characters shown on the screen: Korean
http://img41.imageshack.us/img41/306/ar ... 949kor.jpg

[Screen 3] font: Arial Black / subtitle encoding: UTF-8 / characters shown on the screen: English
http://img198.imageshack.us/img198/6744 ... tf8eng.jpg

[Screen 4] font: Arial Black / subtitle encoding: UTF-8 / characters shown on the screen: Korean
http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/1183 ... tf8kor.jpg

I also checked Arial and Arial Unicode MS, but both of them were displayed with thin glyphs.

For issue 2: Another solution is just to convert your subtitle files to use UTF-8. I am not sure if the byte order mark is necessary.

I converted a subtitle file encoded in CP949 to be encoded in UTF-8, and it solved the problem. Thanks! However, I still think that the problem of resetting Default Encoding to "Auto" needs to be fixed. I'm not sure if this is a generic problem or something specific to my environment though. Is there anyone else experiencing the same problem as mine?

show the advanced settings and go under Input/codecs -> Other codecs -> Subtitles and set the subtitles text encoding there. uncheck utf-8 subtitles autodetection and uncheck formatted subtitles.

under Video -> Subtitles/OSD, pick the Freetype2 font renderer.

for the Subpictures filter module check the freetype2 font renderer checkbox.

under Video -> Subtitles/OSD -> Text renderer, select the asian font file, probably something like /Library/Fonts/#korean.dfont .
set the color, font size, and font effect to your liking.

This works perfectly! Thanks!!!

didn't solve anything for me I have the same issue but playing .ogm with Russian subtitles