I’ve moved this discussion out to its own thread from this previous one

[A previous suggestion has been to include the ability to watch a video with a subtitle track. Since we’d have to incorporate this into the encoder, and “burn” the subtitles in, I’ve moved this thread to the encoder section]

It doesn’t particularly matter whether subtitles calculated in frames or seconds from the beginning. I really like this idea, as we have had a large number of downloads from non-english speaking countries, and it makes sense from a visual standpoint, as the codec can render small text clearly.

SRT files are text-based, and contain a start and end for the text to be displayed on screen, given in a time offset in hours, minutes, seconds and milliseconds. It would involve building a text renderer into the encoder, and compositing the text during the encode stage.

I can’t find anything about the format of MicroDVD subtitle files, but the wikipedia subtitle article seems to suggest that it’s also text-based, but based on frame offset.

There seem to be plenty of tools to convert between one format and another, so picking something like SRT, which is a very easy format to parse would be easier.

I’d love to get some feedback from you guys about this topic.

Yep, I can now see, that SRT format would be good, as it’s based on time, not frames (which are cut after encoding). How about incorporating subtitle converter directly into encoder, to simplify things?

Yes, that’s what I’m thinking of. We could add an extra flag to the encoder, like “-t <srt subtitle file>” which would burn the subtitles into the video during the encode process.

Ok, but there should be backwards compatibility with non-subtitled videos, something, that will indicate subtitles in a video.

Yes of course. All we’re talking about here is introducing a subtitle renderer at the encode stage. The player or the movie file format don’t have to change at all.

You can add something to the filename if you like, to indicate it was encoded with a subtitle track.

I rather the subtitbles to be read by the DSVideo than “burned” into the video. That way it could be posible to add some extra opcions like size, color or position of the subtitle, or choze to render in the bottom or top screen (so it won’t block the view from the original video)

Yep, Firstly I thought they’ll do it this way, and then Nick said, that subtitles will be burned. IMO, both options are good.

Sorry, but as stated before, there is no way we’d be able to work overlay subtitles with the current code. We’ve barely enough time to render the 12.5 frames per second.

In the ‘feature request’ topic you said, that you have issues with subtitle font. I think it should be Trebuchet MS Bold, as it’s very readable (small L differs from small I, it supports different encoding, because it’s official M$ font etc., on the other hand the encoder should accept special flag for font choosing. Also fonts should be dark yellow or white with black border.

Topic about best subtitle font on other forum: http://forum.videohelp.com/topic275079.html