Re: [Bino-list] SubTitles?

[Martin Lambers]

On 09/04/11 13:39, Martin Lambers wrote:
>>>> There is also an issue with font encoding. ASS does not perform encoding
>>>> so I think we will have to do it ourselves. I know you want to avoid
>>>> using Qt, so should we use iconv?
>>>
>>> I'm not sure that I understand the problem completely. According to the
>>> spec, ASS files should be UTF-8, and if they are not, they should set a
>>> special "Encoding" field. When FFmpeg converts SRT to ASS, it should
>>> also handle this for us.
>>>
>>> Are there in fact SRT files that use old 8 bit encodings instead of
>>> UTF-8? If so, is there SRT metadata that tells us what encoding the file
>>> is in?
>>>
>>> If we require the user to set the encoding for each SRT file
>>> individually, wouldn't it be easier for the user to just convert all SRT
>>> files to UTF-8 and solve the problem once and for all?
>>
>> I suppose you are from English speaking country, so you don't need to use 
>> subtitles with almost every movie you watch. For example I'm from Czech 
>> Republic and we have encoding cp1250 in Windows and iso8859-2 in Unix. All 
>> the 
>> subtitles that we use every day are in cp1250 simply because most of the 
>> people translating movies are using Windows and cp1250 was the default 
>> encoding. It has became de facto standard and even now when default changed 
>> to 
>> UTF-8 are still all subtitles in cp1250, because for media players it is 
>> almost impossible to detect correct encoding (there are no metadata). So in 
>> every media player I go to settings and select cp1250 (for example my 
>> mplayer.conf contains "subcp=cp1250"). Please merge also encoding selection, 
>> default will be utf-8 and hopefully ffmpeg will handle encoding conversion 
>> (I 
>> have not noticed it is possible to change encoding during subtitle decoding).
>>
>> I hope my country is not the only one with these weird demands :-) If 
>> someone 
>> non-native-english is reading this, please comment on situation with 
>> subtitles 
>> in your country.
> 
> Thanks for your explanations, now I understand much better. It just
> seemed weird to me that the SRT subtitle format would be widely used
> internationally but cannot handle different encodings - but it seems
> this has historical reasons.
> 
> So I'll merge your enconding patch, most probably using iconv.

Update: it is now merged.

Robert, Jack, thanks for your comments.

Does the current version work for you, or do you need changes?

Martin