The VideoLAN Forums

Good evening.

I'm a new user of VLC media player. I've tried searching the internet and the forums, but didn't find the answer to my question.
I've noticed that when watching a DVD-quality videos (576p) on Full HD or QHD display, the subtitles are very pixelated. It seems that they are added to the frame before upscaling to the full size of the display.
Is there an option to change it so that the text is added after upscaling, so that it doesn't look like displayed on ZX Spectrum? ;-)
I'm attaching an example shot and a second image where I've manually entered the same text in the same Arial font, size 28, in a basic image editor (ShareX editor) to show the quality difference.
I'm using VLC 3.0.16 on Windows 10, posted in this forum, because I think it's not OS-related. If I did it wrong, please forgive.
Thanks in advance.

If the subtitles are DVD subtitles, then they are bitmap images, so yes they are at SD resolution and they look ugly on a 4k display.

Thank you. You mean that subtitles are stored on the DVD disc/in the file as bitmaps?

Yes.

Honestly haven't given much thought to this topic before. Now, when I realized the features and processing power of early DVD players, it makes perfect sense. However in 2022 it's hard to imagine that there were devices without an operating system incapable of rendering text.

Thanks a lot for enlightenment.

Devices were capable of rendering text. This is just a very stupid short-sighted decision by DVD-IF ostensibly so that the subtitles would look the same on all devices.