Subtitle encoding guesser/choose-previewer UPDATE

[w1re]

UPDATE: I just had a look through Trac, and it seems that the following ticket more less describes my feature request (although without the live preview of different encodings described below): http://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/2572.

I have an English Win XP, live in Germany and have a Chinese wife. So naturally, the movies we watch tend to be from all over the place. However, everytime I download Chinese subtitles from a site such as shooter.cn, the subtitles are in GB 18030 encoding, but most other subs (for example from http://www.opensubtitles.org) tend to be in UTF-8.
So already, having to manually set the font to a pan-unicode font such as Arial Unicode took some figuring out, but then having to switch the encoding everytime, restart VLC, then finding out that one chose the wrong encoding can really be a drag.....

So usually, when I need Chinese subtitles, I open the SRT file in Wenlin -- a tool for working with and converting chinese text (also has a dictionary) -- and convert it to UTF-8. Now here's the neat thing: I don't always know for sure what encoding the file is in, but I don't need to because Wenlin asks me to choose the correct one by rendering the first few lines in a couple of encodings (simplified and traditional Chinese, modern and legacy encodings) just as in the picture below:

Now, for those who don't know Chinese, all of the options will seem like gibberish, but for me it's directly clear that I need to click on the second option (GB, the PRC standard) because it's the only one where the Chinese characters make any sense. From then on I save the file in UTF etc and all is fine (well the rendering of the font kinda sucks, but that's another issue [screenshot of blurry subtitles using SimHei font here: http://localhostr.com/file/4qNE6KF/vlcsnap-2011-10-09-18h25m34s42.png])

Now my suggestion:
Somewhere in the subtitle choosing process (for example in the "Open Media" window), the user should be able to live preview the selected subtitle file according to the current settings (encoding, font, size, etc.). The basic settings could be modified in this window, and advanced settings could be hidden behind an "Advanced" button. There, the user could choose between different encodings, and the preview should automatically update to reflect the changes.

As the selection of the right encoding is pretty hard to do right automatically as far as i know, I think that it would be best to give the user the possibility to choose a default encoding as is the case now but also provide him with a simple way of making changes when the default is the wrong choice. Most importantly, this should not require the user to restart VLC.

[w1re]

bump

[VLC_help]

Bump won't really help in this subforum.

[mederi]

And what about following link: http://fredeaker.blogspot.com/2007/01/c ... ction.html
Could this help to develop some intelligent character encoding detection for subtitle files? I knew there were some projects on Internet relating to this topic.
I remember an old directshow player called mv2player that was using such algorithms. You could try it with Asiatic subtitles and let me know whether it works or not. I suggest to switch from default to an older skin there as I think its better.

[w1re]

thanks, I'll try out mv2player.
(Semi-)Automatic detection would be nice but would definitely need to be complemented by the ability to switch encoding on-the-fly without needing to restart VLC and jumping to a place in the movie where there's speech. This is because dual subtitles (chinese-english such as this one: http://shooter.cn/xml/sub/186/186066.xml) and other things are likely going to trip up these algorithms.

I realise that dealing with the mess that text-encodings are, is bound to be quite low on the Dev-team's priority list. But being able to change these subtitle-related settings without having to restart VLC would already be quite helpful.

[mederi]

I have also suggested to do something with the annoying restarting of VLC everytime I do some changes in settings and I do it quite frequently.
So far there is no "Apply changes" button. Some simple procedure could be developed and assigned to that button to automatically remember (in RAM or in simple text file) actual playlist and actual playback position and perform automatic reopen of VLC, loading the remembered playlist and set that playback position.
At least you can set a bookmark (Playback > Bookmarks > Manage bookmarks (Ctrl+B)) and manually save playlist with that bookmark (Media > Save Playlist to File... (Ctrl+Y)). After closing of VLC you can start that playlist and choose the bookmarked position in the player. There is a bug again: running that playlist does not automatically set the playback position there even if it is chcecked in menu. You have to click on it manually (Playback > Bookmarks).
In mv2player you can run 2 independent subtitles and position them easily with a mouse pointer on a screen. Subtitle stripes should be transparent (some setting in Options). I successfully was able to play 3 different subtitles at the same time on a screen using that player in the past. To set proper text encoding just press mouse right button on the screen for context menu.