GSOC proposal

[Andrew Fuller]

On 3/23/08, Fabio Locati <fabiolocati at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Saturday 22 March 2008 14:27:59 Konrad Materka wrote:
>  > Hello,
>  > Firstly, I introduce myself. I'm Konrad, student of Information
>  > Technology at Technical University of Lodz in Poland.
>  > I want to enhance subtitle support in Dragon Player. Project will
>  > include library to read, parse, manipulate and write subtitles and Qt
>  > widget to draw on VideoWidget form Phonon(!), so it can be used in
>  > other projects.
>  >
>  > If you are interested, you can read my proposal:
>  >
>  > http://toya.net.pl/~wodka/GSOC/gsoc_application.pdf
>  > http://toya.net.pl/~wodka/GSOC/gsoc_application.txt
>  >
>  > What do you think about it?
>
> PS: Now seems that the subs are already present :)

(Note: a mere user piping up here, please don't interpret as a
developer comment)

I understand DragonPlayer has gained support for subtitles (AFAIK,
only in 4.1, I don't see it in my 4.0).  However, based on past
experience, there is still much to be desired for GOOD subtitle
support in general.  I would very much like to see your proposal go
forward, Konrad.  I really like that you are not tying it to a
particular application or even group of applications (honestly, I
didn't even think beyond videos, but I'm glad you did!).

For me, my biggest need is the ability to load external subtitles when
playing a DVD.  This is possible with Kaffeine or command line xine
and mplayer, but that's about it as far as I know.  After that, it
would be nice to easily set the font and text size.  Neither setting
is particularly pleasant to set in any of those three options.

A proposal to fix this situation, not just for one player, but for
anyone who uses Phonon... wow!  As a bonus, it would be nice to
attempt auto-detection of character encoding for subtitle files.
Right now I manually re-encode files to utf8 just so I don't have to
keep switching it in the player (another awkward setting).

Here's hoping...

-AF