[Gothicawakening]

Hi All,

I have recently purchased a couple of STBs running Android and XBMC / Kodi. The one for the bedroom is fine, but in the living room I have a projector and the subtitles are massive!

I read on the forums that you can force a smaller minimum size by editing guisettings.xml but every time I do that Kodi seems to ignore it and set the value back to 16.

Right now the subtitles are way to big, and since I can't make them any smaller I browse my movie collection on Kodi, switch to another player to watch, then back to Kodi to set the watched status - not really ideal.

Can anyone help me make the subtitles smaller?

Note: I tried with 13.2, 14.1 and 15-Alpha1, all have same problem.

[Ned Scott]

Never manually edit guisettings.xml. Kodi doesn't read from the file after it has started up, and it's a good way to break the program and force the settings to be reset completely.

Everything that is changed in guisettings.xml is meant to be changed in the actual GUI of the program. See subtitles (wiki).

[Gothicawakening]

Since manually settings only allows the size to go down to 16, and I need it smaller, the answer is Kodi can't do, use another player? Shame, Kodi is perfect except for that one problem.

Is this something we could have in future releases (15 final maybe)? Without it, a lot of people who have 100"+ screens are going to be searching for a different media player.

[Ned Scott]

Only if they have 100"+ screens and are sitting two inches away from it? I just tried it now, and 16 is very small in my living room (and hard to read). I have no objections to such an option, but I'm wondering if your subtitle settings are actually being applied?

[Gothicawakening]

Interesting, will need to see if somehow they are not getting applied then. I have a 110" projector screen, and sit about 7' away. The issues is that we use English subtitles on all movies as English is not my girlfriend's first language. We often need to change position depending on the ratio of the video (ie. below the image for anamorphic, slightly higher for 16:9 etc) and as they are 'backup' for understanding the audio rather than something we need to read, we always have them smaller that for foreign movies.

I find Subtitles in Kodi somewhat frustrating as you have to go back out of the video, into settings and then sub menus to change things - from where you can't actually see how it looks.

On the stock player that comes with my devices (all from Xtreamer) I can adjust Size, Color and Position right from the playing video screen, without having to go back into system settings.

Would be great if Size, Color and Position could be managed from the Audio / Subtitles on-screen-menu while actually playing a file instead of only from settings.

[Gothicawakening]

So I finally had time to play around with Kodi a bit and got to the bottom of this issue.

Initially I made the assumption that if I paused a video, went to settings and changed the subtitle size, then resumed the video that the subtitles would be changed. As it turns out, the only way to change subtitle size if you are already playing a video is to STOP the video, change the subtitle size, then start the video again!

Coming from a player where I can change the size, position and color all from an OSD while the video is running, I found that whole process incredibly frustrating. It would be great to have OSD controls for Subtitle size/ placement / color just like we have for Audio Delay, Subtitle Offset etc.

Anyway.. that's a totally different issue from this thread so I'll start a new one on that.. back to the size:

I measured on my screen and with Size 16, the subtitles are 28mm high. That's easily visible and readable from 7ft away and slightly bigger than the smallest I can get from the stock player installed.

I compiled Kodi from source and tweaked it to allow smaller sizes, I found 12 to be perfect for English movies (where subtitles are backup for my girlfriend who's first language is not English) and 18 for Foreign / Alien movies where subtitle are more important.

Size 16 = 28mm
Size 12 = 22mm

I realize I might be unique in wanting them that small, and since I have everything setup for compiling now I'm good to go.

For anyone finding this thread and wanting to do the same, the change made before compiling was:

xbmc/system/settings/settings.xml line 978

Changed 16 to 12

[Memphiz]

You don't need to compile for this change. You just need to alter the settings.xml in your system/settings folder (which is most likely in your installation folder of kodi).

[Ned Scott]

Meh, why not? https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/6717

[Gothicawakening]

@Memphiz I couldn't find a way to do that on Android, only found the Data folder, am I missing something?

@ned Scott Thanks, that's awesome!

[Memphiz]

Yes you are