Subtitle controls suck

[Juggalo]

1. Changing settings: is it me, or are changes to subtitle settings not used until the next time you open a movie + subtitles? Can't changes just be applied *instantly*?

2. Positioning: that 'force subtitle position' is pretty damn unfriendly. How about setting a percentage, and a combobox for relative to screen or movie border. 0% / movie would result in subtitles being displayed at the top, inside the movie content (regardless of any black borders outside the movie, at top or bottom). 100% / screen would result in subs being displayed at the bottom of the screen (or window, if not watching fullscreen), regardless of vertical occupation of the movie content.

Better yet: also add an option 'customize position' to the right-click menu, allowing you to position an example subtitle line with the mouse, so you can quickly set the position manually while playing.

3. Loading subtitles: you only seem to be able to select a custom subtitles file when opening a file. Why can't I just load a .srt file while playing? (especially useful when I got several subtitle files and not sure which is the correct one, which happens quite a lot actually)

[VLC_help]

1. You are correct.

3. You can drag and drop subtitles to VLC.

[Juggalo]

1. You are correct.

Any chance of this being improved?

3. You can drag and drop subtitles to VLC.

Tnx, never knew this!

One more point while I'm at it:

4. The font size in pixels seems kinda odd: the text becomes larger if I maximize the window. Isn't a font size in pixels supposed to be, well, the specified size in pixels?

[mike18xx]

Annoyance: subtitles cannot be made to appear below the window "off-screen" for wide-screen videos, so that they then appear in the black space when the window is full-screened.

E.g., setting position to -10000 doesn't move 'em any farther down than -100. They remain stubbornly inside the video window, covering up the action. (I find it very lame that they only display "in the black" with a letterboxed video which won't go wide-screen on a wide-screen monitor because the hard-encoded black bars are in the way!)

Ideally there'd be some way of automatically adjusting the placement of subtitles in real-time. I.e., a vertical "slider" which shifts the subtitle's "layer".

[colltek]

Annoyance: subtitles cannot be made to appear below the window "off-screen" for wide-screen videos, so that they then appear in the black space when the window is full-screened.

E.g., setting position to -10000 doesn't move 'em any farther down than -100. They remain stubbornly inside the video window, covering up the action. (I find it very lame that they only display "in the black" with a letterboxed video which won't go wide-screen on a wide-screen monitor because the hard-encoded black bars are in the way!)

Ideally there'd be some way of automatically adjusting the placement of subtitles in real-time. I.e., a vertical "slider" which shifts the subtitle's "layer".

Well, i'm not a "hardcore" programmer like the VLC Crew. Correct me if I'm wrong.
The subtitles cant be on "the black under the video region" because the subtitles are rendered on the actual video. So the whole subtitle rendering will be completely rewritten. I'm not sure but i think there is higher priorities than the subtitle system in VLC. I mean, it works. Maybet not like "some people" want it to work. But however, I think we should give it some time. I'm pretty sure the subtitle functionality will change later on.

But as I said before.... I'm no "hardcore" programmer. I'm not really sure if i'm right, but it seems like it.

[mike18xx]

VLC is a computer media-player; most of what it plays, by definition, will probably be "ripped" video files, not inserted DVDs. Rips, unless made incompetently, strip black bars out of widescreen video. Home-brew 16x9 HD video camera-to-file projects won't have them to start with.

Consequently, figuring out how to display subtitles in unused screen real-estate should be at least a marginal priority.

[DGMurdockIII]

you can uses this to help the subtitle support http://sublib.sourceforge.net/

[Juggalo]

VLC is a computer media-player; most of what it plays, by definition, will probably be "ripped" video files, not inserted DVDs. Rips, unless made incompetently, strip black bars out of widescreen video.

How do you mean 'strip out of', as far as I know hardly ANY video (neither widescreen original nor rip) actually contains any black bars at all, right?

The common black bars you see are because the video doesn't fill the entire screen (because the aspect ratios of the video content and screen are different), not because they're actually in the video content. Since that leaves part of the screen unused, it'd be nice if VLC could put the subs there.

Consequently, figuring out how to display subtitles in unused screen real-estate should be at least a marginal priority.

If it requires a rewriting of the rendering engine like colltek suggests, then I agree. But doesn't VNC simply have access to the whole screen when playing fullscreen?

[Arite]

VLC is a computer media-player; most of what it plays, by definition, will probably be "ripped" video files, not inserted DVDs. Rips, unless made incompetently, strip black bars out of widescreen video.

How do you mean 'strip out of', as far as I know hardly ANY video (neither widescreen original nor rip) actually contains any black bars at all, right?

As an example, DVD-Video have a resolution of eith 720x576 (PAL - 5:4) or 720x480 (NTSC - 3:2). Anamorphic DVDs up 16:9 can make full use of the video frame size since the video can be stretched vertically to fill the entire frame. However, beyond 16:9 (which for e.g. PAL the output resolution is 1024x576) the video is streched vertically by a scale factor of ~1.42, which make better use of the video frame, however since the anamorphic limitation for DVDs has been reached, it is still letterboxed with black bars at the top and bottom.

So if you take any Anamophic DVD with an aspect ratio of e.g. 1.85:1, 2.35:1 etc. (greater than 16:9) then you will see black bars at the top and bottom.

Cheers, Arite.

[jech]

The feature you are asking for is called letterbox. Letterboxing means that the video player will add black borders to any video to match the AR of your screen (5:4, 4:3, 16:10 etc.) The letterboxing of course has to be done before the subtitles are rendered. Every standalone DVD player can do it. Almost every computer video player or subtitle filter (MPlayer, MPC, KMPlayer, ViPlay, ffdshow, VobSub etc.) can do it. Unfortunately not VLC.

I was already asking about this feature 4 years ago. But there's a serious problem. The subtitles are rendered into video before applying any filters. So even if I created a letterbox filter (which I wanted to do) it wouldn't help.

[Arite]

Yes, in order to do that there would need to be a complete rework of VLC's video output - there was a previous topic about this here:
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=41695

Arite.

[jech]

I don't see inside of VLC, but why would it be such a big deal to move subtitle rendering after filters?

The problem is not only with letterbox but also with crop filter. The subtitles are then cropped together with video.

[Arite]

VLC only outputs the video frame - in order have subtitles positioned outside of the video would require VLC to output a video which was dependant on the window size/screen resolution. It is possible, just would require a lot of rewritten code just to be able to do that.

You can actually add black bars to e.g. the top and bottom of a video in VLC, in real time. In order to do this you need to specify the video padding on the top and bottom of the video in the Preferences. Once that has been done you can stream the output, transcoding the video (audio can be duplicated) to the display by ticking "Play locally" in the "Stream output" window.

Here is a quick real-time test which I did:



The original video did have very small black bars at the top and bottom, however I added on 100 pixel padding to each (so vertical resolution increased by 200px). I also scaled the video down to 0.75 times the size and overlayed the subtitles (for the purpose of taking the screenshot). The video codec and bitrate was just the default (mp4v at 1024kbps).

The quality if course is degraded slightly (the same process could be outputted to e.g. a file in less than real time though) - however since that was just a test the setting could be optimised more to give a higher quality video output.

Cheers, Arite.

[jech]

This seems to me like quite difficult workaround. I think the problem is much more simple.

You don't have to adjust the height of black stripes according to movie window. Because the user is expected to set the AR of his/her screen. Let's say I have a 4:3 monitor. I will never want video with AR different then 4:3. Of course I don't talk about stretching the video but about adding black borders to make it 4:3.

So all you have to do is following calculation: black_border_height = (video_width*3/4-video_height)/2

The add these black border to video. That's all. Look at this screenshot from ffdshow subtitle filter:

[mike18xx]

If there are preference settings that can be tweaked without rewriting display code, then all we really need is an easier means of doing it, with, preferably, some automation built-in. E.g., it's a 16x9 monitor and user is playing 2.35:1 image, so there will be black bars...and subtitles will fit [i]down there[/i]. (The image could even be shifted to the top of the screen, so that ALL of the black is on the bottom, preventing any double-line subtitles from overlapping the video.)

[mike18xx]

Jech, it sounds like the ability is already present in VLC.

Subsequently, all that's needed now is for new versions of VLC to position subtitles automatically from the bottom of the screen by default (rather than bottom of the video frame by default). It will do this by determining first determining display dimensions.

(Next wanted subtitle feature: Automatic unwrapping so that a lot of subs.....

don't like like this, which
is
really effing annoying.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

I think most of those issues have already been fixed in nightly builds, but I may mistake...

[jech]

I just checked the latest build and I think all the subtitles problems are still there:
1) Letterbox - if it's there, I can't find it
2) In Windows font can't be chosen, no font is selected by default.
3) Size can only be set in 5 steps. Font size in pixels would be much better.
4) Subtitles are not found automatically. I have to dig deep in settings to select the subtitle file manually. The naming scheme is video.avi and video.cs.srt and video.eng.srt.
5) There is a field called "Force subtitle position", but whatever I enter in this field, the subtitles' won't move below active picture frame. The changes are applied after restarting playback.

So unfortunately I see no progress in subtitles display since 0.8.

[brzeczyk]

I must admit that I completely agree: the ability to display subtitles in the letterbox area should become a priority. I work for a software company and I know that it should be possible to write code that expands the "active" video area to any format. If there is a crop filter, there should be a letterbox filter as well. I do realize that it may be a problem that subtitles are rendered before applying filters, and I think this should be rewritten. In fact, this would be also beneficial for another reason: right now, when a video is rendered full-screen, the pixels of the subtitles are scaled up just like the video pixels. This results in ugly low-resolution subtitle display. Ideally, subtitles should be displayed after filters such as resize, crop or letterbox have been applied, and only after the final rendering size has been determined. This way, the subtitles could be rasterized in high quality, with nice smooth antialiased fonts and not low-res font bitmaps that have been scaled up along with the video.

On Windows, I can revert to other video players (Media Player Classic + ffdshow being my favorite), but on Mac OS X, VLC is my only option (for some reason the Perian subtitle support is broken on my machine, plus it is zero-customizable).

Also, it might be useful to look into integrating an OpenType Layout engine such as ICU Layout or HarfBuzz into the VLC subtitle display engine so that it becomes truly multilingual (able to display Arabic, Indic or Hebrew subtitles properly).

B.

[VLC_help]

With VLC only option is to use nightlies because VLC can't (ab)use vobsub, ffdshow or other directshow stuff.

[Ux64]

Subsequently, all that's needed now is for new versions of VLC to position subtitles automatically from the bottom of the screen by default (rather than bottom of the video frame by default). I

Whoa! Excellent, that's the only reason why I have been really missing Windows video players. (And another is unacceptable poor h264 performance)

At least one of my worries would be gone!

- Thank you!

[BlackBox]

I really like VLC player, it's my favourite...
No other player can open all the files VLC can...
But there is one thing that bothers me...
I live in Serbia and most of the subtitles in Serbian use specific characters (letters)...
In some other video players there is an option to use CENTRAL EUROPEAN script and they display all the letters...
VLC can't do that (as I know)...
And I can't change the font size - the letters are always too small and thin...
So, setting the font properties option - that's all it takes to give a perfect 10 to VLC

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

YOu can set the encoding and the font in the subtitles preferences.

[frantisek]

Hello,

I would like to add following to subtitles discussion.

For native English speaking people it is may not priority but for rest of us it is. Even I speak and understand say well it is priority. I do not watch video alone often and I do not catch all those meanings in videos and if you loose main points then it is worthless to watch at all.

As I understood from discussions it is not possible to put subtitles off-screen. But in last posts there is some evidence that there is solution but nothing happened since then. Only solutions for dummies are workable.

Off-screen problem could be partly solved when subtitles would be readable at all. Sorry guys, I know you put a lot of energy into project and for free but subtitles are readable sometimes miserable. See pictures bellow:

readable in Niceplayer (QuickTime):


hardly readable in VLC:




Since I prefer VLC I would be glad when you could make subtitles bold with really bold borders. That would be fine for now. Maybe at all. Making subtitles bigger does not help. In Niceplayer there is no settings it just work.

Looking forward and thanks for your work. I can hardly help since I have no coding knowledge.

Frantisek

[Arite]

You can make the outline wider by changing the effect to "Fat Outline". To do this go to:
Tools >> Preferences... >> Subtiles & OSD

And change the "Effect" to "Fat Outline". Press "Save" and try a video.

Arite.