GSOC proposal

[Ian Monroe]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 11:26 AM, Andrew Fuller
<mactalla.obair at gmail.com> wrote:
>  (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.

Well this entire proposal is about external subtitles. It won't really
affect internal subtitles, unless we figure out something smart.

It would be pretty easy to add external subtitle support to phonon and
phonon-xine (just learned how to this week) but doing stuff like
having draggable subtitles would always be impossible. Also phonon
doesn't yet have a backend configuration framework (which it probably
should get at some point) so setting subtitle size wouldn't be
possible, this project would also solve that issue.

> 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!

Well anyone who uses his library with Phonon anyways. :)

>  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