The new vlc 2.0 for mac subtitle trouble.......

[tiesto]

Hi, when I first saw it, I was REALLY impressed...
(I just love the new black interface!!!)
I'm also disappointed in the many bugs or just silly changes made.
1) The subtitles. I've tried ALL the encodings, (on the old one I didn't have ANY problems with this), bu the diacritical marks (in romanian language) show up as CHECK BOXES. WHYYYYYYYYYY???? I'm not doing ANYTHING wrong!!!

2) As this wasn't enough, it also SKIPS MANY lines in the subtitle.

2)the fast forward & next buttons in the player bar get joined.... (I would have put more sad faces, but it's not permited...)

3) The white timeline bar & the volume bar are GONE........ (I would have put more sad faces, but it's not permited...)

*****I wish there would be made a feature to remember the play history, even if you close the app, or restart*****
Other than that, It's amazing... reallly.... I love this app...
Anyway... Is there anything I can do so the subtitles show with the right encoding (Latin-2, ISO 88592, or Windows 1250)? PLEASE!!!
(I haven't tried with other subtitle languages...)

[tiesto]

Another annoying thing is the volume delay... it takes about a full second for the sound to get turned up or down...

[nkoriyama]

Try another font.
Default setting is Arial Black. Change it to Arial Unicode or so.

Check your subtitles file encoding.
Is the file encoding really same as your VLC setting?
If you convert the subtitles file encoding to UTF-8 (it means *NOT* changing VLC setting *BUT* converting the subtitles file itself), can you see the subtiltes properly?

[nkoriyama]

If you still have some problem with the subtitles, please share the subtitles file (srt or so).

[tiesto]

THANK YOU VERY MUCH! This was the actual problem. I just changed the font to Arial and works like a charm... (:

[edomoli]

Hi to you all,

I'm having a little problem with encoding too; first of all I'll say that with default Arial Black and default UTF-8 encoding all works great, so the "basic" is just fine!
[I'm on Mac OS X Lion 10.7.4, up to date]

The thing is that I'd like to change the font that VLC uses to display subtitles, and I tried with various free sans serif fonts (Sansation, Museo Sans, Aller, etc. - see this blog post);
my problem is that with any of these fonts the render of the music note character '♪' (among some few other) isn't correct (it displays a square box instead of the correct glyph).

On other softwares (rich text editors such as MS Word for Mac, Pages, etc.) the display of that character with those fonts is correct, so they should have the glyph definition in them...
So I was wondering, why does VLC fail to render that glyph? Maybe is the font renderer that I choose (freetype2)? Maybe effectively the glyph isn't present in the font?


Thinking more deeply about it (I'm a programmer, so I'm gonna be a bit technical here), maybe I see the glyph in the rich text editors because they have a fallback mechanism so if the glyph isn't defined in the selected font, they take that glyph from another font (in which it is present) maybe from a fallback fonts list, searching for the first font that has the desired glyph.

I'm quite convinced about this hypothesis because as you can see from the following screenshots (from Word and Pages), the single note character for those free sans serif fonts is the same across all of them (suggesting it is coming from the same fallback font), but it is instead "stylized" correctly (according to the specific font style) in Helvetica, Arial and Arial Black system fonts (because it is present - i.e. supported - in the font, and of course with those system fonts I can also see the correct character in VLC subtitles).

• screenshot 1 (from Word);
• screenshot 2 (from Pages).

Do you think VLC should provide a fallback font (maybe coming from a widely supported list of fallback fonts, wisely chosen) for those glyphs that aren't present in the user chosen subtitles font?
Maybe I should request this feature in another thread?

Any comment or advice is very welcome, thanks for your time in reading this!

Best regards

[edomoli]

I just found an online service that is AMAZING, FileFormat.Info has a section about Unicode, in which you can search for a specific character code (for example the '♪'), and then just click on "Fonts that support U+266A" to find out what fonts support that character code! WOW!

Anyway, my question remains... should VLC support a font fallback mechanism for the non supported character glyphs?
Maybe the above links could sound interesting enough to the VLC developers too...

Let me know what do you think about the subject. Thanks a lot!

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Fallback fonts for only some characters is not simple to do. But someone could do it.