Vobsub in MKV looses colour

[mac_man_ad]

Hi all,
I have an mkv movie file with some vob subs. These subs are yellow when vlc 0.99a loads them as separate files (.idx/.sub pair), as they should be, but when muxed into the mkv with mkvmerge 2.60, they display white. re-extracting the subs with mkvextract confirms the idx colour palette is still present.
OSX 10.5.6, VLC 0.99a, MKVTools 2.60

Thanks in advance, Andrew

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Can you share it?

[mac_man_ad]

Can you point me to your preferred upload site?
Also, do you want the orig. sub files and the movie separately?

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

ftp://streams.videolan.org/incoming/

[mac_man_ad]

I do not seem to have drop access when mounted through the Finder, and I have proxy troubles through the cli.
Can I say this problem happens with all the VobSubbed files I play with and leave it at that?
Oh, also the subs show white in Quicktime via Perian, so this may be a ffmpeg or matroska problem rather than VLC Mac.

Sorry for being a nuisance with the ftp.

[edit: some may be partially uploaded, cli connection keeps stalling]

[mac_man_ad]

45 second clip and subs uploaded as vob sub colour.mkv, idx and sub

[JohnAStebbins]

I also ran into this problem. I had a look at the code, and it looks like it ignores the palette. In modules/demux/mkv.c where it processes the CodecPrivate data for tracks with type S_VOBSUB, it reads only the size. All the idx data is contained in the CodecPrivate data and it appears to be ignoring it.

[mac_man_ad]

Should I point at Handbrake now, where you guys have decoded colour info for ages and are about to implement a VobSub-in-mkv soft sub option?

Cheers, Andrew

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

I also ran into this problem. I had a look at the code, and it looks like it ignores the palette. In modules/demux/mkv.c where it processes the CodecPrivate data for tracks with type S_VOBSUB, it reads only the size. All the idx data is contained in the CodecPrivate data and it appears to be ignoring it.

Are you able to fix it?

[JohnAStebbins]

I'm in the middle of adding vobsub and srt support in mkv to handbrake. But after I get that sorted out, I'll see what I can do.

[JohnAStebbins]

Fixed. I sent a patch to the vlc-devel mailing list. It can also be found here: http://pastebin.com/m2ce212a6

It turns out vlc is now using libavformat for parsing mkv. modules/demux/mkv is no longer used. libavformat returns the data that is needed in AVCodecContext.extradata. Just had to check the container type and the subtitle type, then parse the data.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

I haven't seen the patch on the mailing list.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Moreover, it seems weird that mkv isn't the default anymore, I'll have to check this.
OK, this is weird, since demux_New should auto-probe mkv, when extension is mkv

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

This has been applied for trunk for VLC 1.1! Thanks so much!