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[svalavuo]

Chris:
It's so great news, that someone from the core development team is interested of subtitles.
I would go to teletext subtitles first (more common) and after that DVB subtitles (not used in meny countries (afaik)).

[muellerph]

When I would like to see another issue solved is a support like the Avards-Plugin.

This thread is in german, so I translate the topic:
The Avards-Plugin is use for the automatic recognition and surpression of the black borders when widescreen material is broadcasted in a 4:3 mode (letterbox format). This is done in a way so that the TV gets via the WSS signal a zoom factor.

Some stations are still broadcasting everything in 4:3. Now that I have 2 16:9 TVs this is very ugly. I need to switch on the TV all the time the zoom factor and then I don't see the OSD anymore. So in order to see the OSD I need to toggle the TV setting again.

Also I have the impression, that when we send the compressed signal through the SCART cable and zoom at the TC we get a lower qualtiy then if we already send a zoomed picture through SCART and don't need to do anything on TV.

[rdoac]

That sounds quite good.  Quite a lot of UK TV is already 16:9, so we have a widescreen TV.  However, Italian TV is 4:3, and when they go for 16:9 they broadcast it with top and bottom borders and a channel logo at the top. Xineliboutput does a fairly good job of scaling it (on the fly) and chops the logo (which is ok by me).

However, having a button on the Vomp menu, say zoom, which scales up the source could work?  Or is there a cleverer way to do it?

[svalavuo]

Hi,
Anyone doing anything for subtitles -support?

Chris mentioned, that subtitles -support isn't in Santa's bag, but where does it place in roadmap?
Actualy subtitles is the property in MVP for me at the moment.
My colleague is in same situation and I assume that every user in Finland with MVP wishes subtitles -support appear asap.

I don't intend this as complaint, I'm happy user of great product!
Thank you everyone participating development of this great project!

[davep]

Hopefully over the break I'll work out why VOMP won't play recordings made with vdr > 1.5.9 (ie versions with subtitling support). Maybe one small step on the road to subtitles...

[svalavuo]

davep: great news!

Can it be something to do with the style (or mean, or way, or something) of saving subtitles with the stream?
I don't know what is the reason that vdr > 1.5.9 subtitles aren't compatible with vdr < 1.5.10.
Earlier versions used plugin for subtitles and now it's builtin, but why they changed the way that I don't know.

I noticed that recordings made with vdr > 1.5.9 don't play correctly with vdr < 1.5.10 (subtitles doesn't work). Probably same reason they don't play through vomp with MVP.

[MarkC]

Hopefully over the break I'll work out why VOMP won't play recordings made with vdr > 1.5.9 (ie versions with subtitling support). Maybe one small step on the road to subtitles...

I think I've just solved this one. There was a bug in the AC3 audio code: if the demuxer came across a private stream packet that was not an AC3 packet (like a subtitle packet) then it just hung on it forever.

Fixed in CVS. I can't test AC3 but I've tried my best not to break it in the process

[svalavuo]

So does this mean that subtitles -support is no longer on "short-term roadmap"?

I can't do any C programming (or C++ either), but is there anything I could do to help to get subtitles (teletext & DVB) to work with MVP?
It is quite important to at least to us in Finland.

[davep]

I think I've just solved this one. There was a bug in the AC3 audio code: if the demuxer came across a private stream packet that was not an AC3 packet (like a subtitle packet) then it just hung on it forever.

Fixed in CVS. I can't test AC3 but I've tried my best not to break it in the process

I spent ages looking at that code and convinced myself it was OK 

Yes that now works with recordings from vdr > 1.5.9. Many thanks.

[MarkC]

I spent ages looking at that code and convinced myself it was OK 

Yeah, it did look OK. Probably a bad design decision on my part, that the function has to "pretend" it has processed the data instead of just ignoring the packet.

So does this mean that subtitles -support is no longer on "short-term roadmap"?

Well, I can't promise anything yet, but fixing that bug and installing vdr 1.5.12 got me interested, and I now have the vdr subtitles code and can fiddle with it.
I hope we can use a lot of that VDR code as it stands, leaving the hard bit Marten mentioned: synchronising with the video/audio streams.
I'll be seeing Chris before the new year so we might find time to discuss it and think about what's involved.

[svalavuo]

It would be great!

I don't intend to greed, but how about teletext -subtitles? 
In 1.5.12 there is only DVB -subtitles builtin, but teletext subtitles are more common (at least in Finland).

[MarkC]

I don't intend to greed, but how about teletext -subtitles? 
In 1.5.12 there is only DVB -subtitles builtin, but teletext subtitles are more common (at least in Finland).

Well it will definitely be DVB subtitles first, so that we can test the system locally in the UK with live data.

Once that's done, we would hopefully have a fairly general system for displaying dynamic OSD over the video, so a back end for teletext could follow, either written by us or someone else.

Sounds good in theory anyway

[svalavuo]

Sounds great!

As I mentioned earlier, we have DVB -subtitles in national channels (YLE & some MTV3 -channels) so DVB -subtitles support will be great.
Teletext -subtitles is used by pay/movie -channels (Canal+, Viasat, ...).

[MartenR]

Once that's done, we would hopefully have a fairly general system for displaying dynamic OSD over the video, so a back end for teletext could follow, either written by us or someone else.

For this dynamic OSD stuff it would be nice, if we can discuss the way it will be implemented in advance, so that it can be easily ported to windows.
Especially I'm unsure if the timing stuff should be in the device dependent objects or in os dependent framework.

Marten

[MarkC]

For this dynamic OSD stuff it would be nice, if we can discuss the way it will be implemented in advance, so that it can be easily ported to windows.
Especially I'm unsure if the timing stuff should be in the device dependent objects or in os dependent framework.

Yep, don't worry, I always try to keep the Windows port in mind. In fact I try to think in more general terms of an unspecified output device, as in future there will probably be other OS's or hardware boxes requiring support.

I'm not going to start anything until I've talked to Chris, and I expect he'll be exchanging emails with you. I haven't thought about it properly yet, and this may be too simplistic, but I expect the existing device-dependent Video::getCurrentTimeStamp() to supply all we need for timing. A good solution (provided it exists) will "just work" on both platforms.