[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] new codec id for SSA/ASS subtitles

Evgeniy Stepanov eugeni.stepanov
Sat Dec 29 20:51:01 CET 2007


On Saturday 29 December 2007 22:32:56 Aurelien Jacobs wrote:
> On Sat, 29 Dec 2007 18:42:46 +0300
>
> Evgeniy Stepanov <eugeni.stepanov at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > current matroska demuxer mangles SSA/ASS subtitles by stripping 8 leading
> > fields from each line in an effort to make them look like plaintext
> > subtitles. I believe that conversion between different formats is not a
> > dexumer's job.
>
> I agree. That was just a simple way to get those subtitles at least
> partly working. Right now, MPlayer display them properly as plain text.
>
> > With this patch, SSA/ASS subtitles are kept unchanged. To distinguish
> > them from simple plaintext subtitles, a new codec id is added.
>
> That's something desirable. And I'm willing to apply this patch.
> But this will break playback of those subtitles in MPlayer.
> Do you plan to improve MPlayer's demux_lavf so that it supports
> SSA subtitles ?

I do.

> Also I gave one more look at SSA specs, and I think we may need
> to append the following text to the extradata so that a clean
> SSA decoder can decode packets payload without having to guess
> fields contents:
>
> [Events]
> Format: ReadOrder, Layer, Style, Name, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Effect,
> Text
>
> At least that's what I deduced from:
> http://www.matroska.org/technical/specs/subtitles/ssa.html
> Do you agree with this ?

I think this document is outdated. There are files that require this, but they 
are quite rare. All of them seem to have been created with some old version 
of mkvmerge. Newer mkvmerge versions, as well as libass, add these lines if 
they are not already present.

So, this is a workaround for some ancient files. It probably belongs in 
demuxer. But this lines should only be added if they are not already present. 
Also, notice that they differ for SSA and ASS (see libass/ass.c:715). And, at 
least with libass, this is not required.




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