This was previously discussed in the topic below:
viewtopic.php?t=31824
LibASS is an opensource SSA/ASS library that produces subtitles very close to the ones produced by vobsub and gabest's subtitle libraries. It's uses freetype and fontconfig.
Since the original post about it, it's been segregated into it's own library that's available as a tarball at sourceforge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/libass/
Is there any chance that VideoLAN will be using it in the future?
On a related note, for those of us that run OS-X, will we ever see versions of VideoLAN with statically linked freetype and/or fontconfig?
-Ben