The VideoLAN Forums

Hi and HNY,
How to set for e.g black background with white fonts foreground? It's a good way to improve contrast that I can't find out how to achieve with VLC.

Thanks
alex

I wonder the same thing, how do I get some blach shadow around the subtitle so Its readeble when the movie is light like if a person have a white t-shirt on.

I have also been dying to know if it is possible to outline subtitles in black, its terrible on light backgrounds...

thanks

Yes it will a very nice feature.

I was thinking maybe they could give us a cheap solution to this for now by double rendering the subtitles. Shouldn't it be pretty easy to do the subtitles in black, then again in white in a smaller font on top of that? Might not be the prettiest solution, but it seems like a simple temporary fix.

Re-rendering with a smaller font will make it look like crap unless rekerning is considered, which will take much cpu work. It's probably easier to just do a simple drop shadow -- Offset 2 px x, 2 px y, Render in black, then offset -3 px x, -3 px y and render in white.

There are other issues with it as well. caching of the rendered glyphs etc.

The best solution is to write a native Windows text renderer, and a native Mac OS X text renderer, but those are gigantic tasks, for which we currently simply lack the man power.