Manually setting the subtitle position is no good because that could very well not apply to the next video, and changing it every time is an unnecessary pain in the butt. Besides, subtitle positioning does not even work if you have to use the cropping function because or some reason, the program applies the corp after the subtitle position is set.
One extremely simple and fast solution to subtitle positioning is to allow the user to set (or set by default since it is optimal) a so-called “magnet subtitle positioning” feature whereby the subtitles are pulled to the closest vertical edge.
In other words, when VLC is about to display a line of subtitle text, it checks to see if the default position (set by the video) is above or below the middle line of the video, and then displays the text flush with either the top or bottom edge of the video. That way, subtitles that are supposed to be below the picture will be at the bottom, and subs that are supposed to be above (e.g., to avoid obscuring something we need to see at the bottom of the frame) will be flush against the top edge. Now they will avoid obscuring anything important.
