The VideoLAN Forums

Hello again... I got another request for you all... actually a few, but it all has to do with 1 thing:

Subtitles

Firstly, VLC does not support custom fonts and styles into its subtitles. There are AVIs out there that have the ability to show the same AVI almost no matter what because of its ability to embed the font and style in the AVI. This is done for good purposes: it confuses the encoding process less because when an AVI is encoded with subtitles embedded, the motion detection does not work as well because subtitles are overlapped off of moving pictures (movie).

Secondly, there needs to be more options with the subtitles in general. This includes borders and outlines around the letters (which can be adjusted), being able to change where the subtitles are being displayed, custom colors for those, and finally the ability to change spacing of the words. This is because even with being able to change colors and the font, sometimes it is very unreadable.

If you need an example of a file that has font styles embedded in the movie, I can provide one.

(You know that I watch anime now because of this request..)

Well it's open source. I would say go right ahead
We have had all this on our TODO list for a long time, so anyone who wants to implement this is welcom to do so.

Er... I can't code. However, I know of another program that has all these features and is open source... I don't know if this is possible to maybe use that code, but take a look at this:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/

It's called Media Player Classic.

Mplayer Classic uses VSfilter, which is completly unportable. it uses all kinds of windows specific things.

I'm also an anime fan and this would be great features to have in VLC. AFAIK the biggest task is to have full SSA/ASS support, right now it just reads the text but there is a lot of information in them a part from that, colour, size, position, type... I can't code (yet), would it be difficult to add this?

I'm reading that MKV supports files to be attached to it (such as fonts), can VLC read those files?

Regards.

i too motion for this, as changing subtitles appearance would be great

Isn't that https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/82 ?

Would it be difficult or impractical to 'cheat' on boardered subtitles?
By this I mean that you could simply double render the fonts once in black, and a second time, smaller, and in white.

Not sure of how well that would work, but it sounds like a possible temporary solution.