Fansubbing Subtitles Overlap SSA SRT? Wha?!

[kayne001]

I'm kind of new to this but I've been looking in these forums trying to find a definitive up to date answer.
When I watch video that is fansubbed (basically anime and asian shows).
In them they often have side notes shown at the top of the screen while the regular conversion is shown at the bottom. Now I know .098a doesn't support SSA (right?) but it does support .srt files. I only have .srt files. I heard in one of these threads while searching for the answer that sometimes the .srt files are converted to ssa????

Anyways I wanted to show an example and get the exact take on this. I've also read that VLC 1 will fix this problem?
Here's my example:


This video is an avi (not an mkv) with an .srt. In Mediaplayer Classic (CCCP) it renders fine, however I really want to use one media player instead of two or three. Mediaplayer Classic works fine but there are some problems that make it clunky to use. If there is no current fix I'm not impatient so I can wait. In the posts I have searched they were all dated either Sept 2008 or earlier. They all mentioned nightly builds to fix this, but seeing as it is Jan 2009 and I have 098a I'm wondering if I need to change settings.
Also the sticky thread that talks about the Known Problems says this:
SSA Subs using external police are broken

external police? Not sure what that is but I'm guessing that means SSA's don't work for vlc , correct? In summation the .srt files I have are they really SSA's? (And therefore will not position them correctly until a later build)

[VLC_help]

SSA subtitles do work in VLC. Much better in 1.0.0 release. But some .SRT formattings don't work in VLC. Like that {\a6}

[kayne001]

SSA subtitles do work in VLC. Much better in 1.0.0 release. But some .SRT formattings don't work in VLC. Like that {\a6}

thank you, I thought that VLC plays all .srt files. Thanks for the quick reply!

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Could you have the srt file please and tell us which fansub team did that?

Once again, some fansub team seem to think that they are more clever than everyone else... And use .srt with .ssa tags...

SRT are TEXT files, for text/unstyled subtitles,
SSA are Style subtitles,
If you need style subtitles, use SSA, not SRT...

[2Shye]

Just for anyone whos interested..

theres a tool that can fix that problem. its called Macallan convertsrt2ssa its freeware and will convert the {\a6} tags in a srt file to the correct format in an ssa file which will then play nicely in vlc..