[bornagainpenguin]

Just bumping this old thread to ask if there could now be enough interest in enabling something like this? This is a request that I and others have been making for some time now, and I understand in the past there simply wasn't enough interest on behalf of the Kodi team to pursue it, has that changed at all in the intervening four years?

Thank you for the consideration of reading the request.

PS: If I were capable of coding I would have submitted something by now, so no I cannot submit a patch.

[Memphiz]

i think your ps also holds true for any interested developer

[bornagainpenguin]

i think your ps also holds true for any interested developer

Not really, the capabilities have been baked into mplayer for a while now and I even found a way to sort of get a closed captioning look but it needs an option for black colored subtitles to work.

The bit about providing a patch myself was a preemptive shot against the type of troll who infests OSS projects and responds to any feature request with the words 'the code is available, do it yourself' which is fine if you only expect coders to use the software, not so good otherwise.

And don't get me wrong, no one owes me or anyone else anything. I'm just asking if any one new has joined who might be interested.

[Memphiz]

i ment it more in a sense of - if there was a developer interested in this it would have been there already...

[bornagainpenguin]

i ment it more in a sense of - if there was a developer interested in this it would have been there already...

Fair enough. I'll just wait another three years or so and ask again. I'd like to think I'm a pretty patient guy. And it's not like I haven't asked for this before. (Although I swear there was an earlier request back in 2009 or 2010 but I can't find it now.)

Thanks again for your time to reply.

[Memphiz]

yeah - the number of requests you did is proper for sure...

[bornagainpenguin]

yeah - the number of requests you did is proper for sure...

Technically I've only ever chimed in on this feature request when others have made the request as an indicator of interest. I've only directly requested help once with a thread created, when I was suggested to seek out a font that would replicate the experience a bit and having found such a font realized that I needed a font color which was not present.

Hmmm...now that I look at it, I see that I didn't even actually make a feature request for a black color option in the subtitle fonts. Thanks for pointing that out.

[noggin]

I'd definitely support this as an option, ideally with a transparency option. Using grey backgrounds is common for subtitles on many TV stations as it can ensure readability whatever the background, whereas relying on black edging can just make things a bit 'busy'. I would very much appreciate this option within Kodi.

[john3voltas]

I've loved XBMC ever since I started using it back in 2008/2009.
I'm Portuguese and I usually only watch English contents. I can understand most of what I watch in English - maybe 80-90% - but late at night I need to keep the sound at a minimum not to bother my family in their sleep. So using subtitles is a must for me.
Unfortunately at times I can't read the subs because the aspect ratio of the video is 16:9 fullscreen with no top/bottom black bars and the image is whitish.
Having an internal option to make a black or gray box behind the sub text would be great. Or maybe if someone could make it an addon instead of an internal option.

It would be pretty neat to do this from within XBMC, but I should point out, it's also possible to extract the subs, add something like this and then remux the sub as a stylized sub (SSA). Hmm, maybe I'll throw together a little guide on how to do that..

Did Ned Scott ever explain how to do this?
Does anyone here know what he had in mind? How we could do it manually ourselves?
Cheers

EDIT:
Okay, I found some more info by googling.
Apparently ASS/SSA support this feature called BorderStyle and it can draw a black background for the subs.
http://fileformats.wikia.com/wiki/SubStation_Alpha
We just need to change it to 3 like this:

[V4+ Styles]
Format: Name, Fontname, Fontsize, PrimaryColour, SecondaryColour, OutlineColour, BackColour, Bold, Italic, Underline, StrikeOut, ScaleX, ScaleY, Spacing, Angle, BorderStyle, Outline, Shadow, Alignment, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Encoding
Style: Default,Arial,16,&Hffffff,&Hffffff,&H0,&H0,0,0,0,0,100,100,0,0,3,1,0,2,10,10,10,0

In order to do that we need to take an SRT subtitle, make sure it's in UTF-8 and then use something like ffmpeg to convert from SRT into ASS.
Let's say that we want to convert sub1.srt to ASS. Just use:

Code:

file -bi sub1.srt

If it says it's in anything else but UTF-8 (say iso8859-1) I still need to convert to UTF-8 using:

Code:

iconv.exe -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 sub1.srt > sub1-utf8.srt

Then I need to delete the original non UTF-8 file:

Code:

rm sub1.srt

...and rename sub1-utf8.srt back to sub1.srt

Code:

mv sub1-utf8.srt sub1.srt

To convert from SRT to ASS I need to run:

Code:

ffmpeg -i sub1.srt sub1.ass

And finally, find the borderstyle value and change it with something like sed:

Code:

sed -i '9s/.*/Style: Default,Arial,28,\&Hffffff,\&Hffffff,\&H0,\&H0,0,0,0,0,100,100,0,0,3,1,0,2,10,10,10,0/' sub1.ass

This would change font size to 28 and make a black border around the subs by changing the whole 9th line of the ASS file with a different version.

Could all this be somehow compressed and optimized into a one liner?
Could it be possible that all these commands come on every linux box and on every LibreELEC/OpenELEC?
Windows doesn't come with these, right? And Android?
Could it be possible for someone with coding skills to come up with something similar as an addon?
XBMC would use the regular subtitles mechanism that we have today. It would download an SRT file from a site like opensubtitles.org and then it would apply all this nonsense and in the end we would have readable subs on very bright videos. Far from optimal, it's a shitty hack and it uses full black instead of gray or semi transparent layer on top of the video but at least it would be readable...
Anyone one with proper skills want to chime in here?
Cheers

[bornagainpenguin]

I've loved XBMC ever since I started using it back in 2008/2009.
I'm Portuguese and I usually only watch English contents. I can understand most of what I watch in English - maybe 80-90% - but late at night I need to keep the sound at a minimum not to bother my family in their sleep. So using subtitles is a must for me.
Unfortunately at times I can't read the subs because the aspect ratio of the video is 16:9 fullscreen with no top/bottom black bars and the image is whitish.
Having an internal option to make a black or gray box behind the sub text would be great. Or maybe if someone could make it an addon instead of an internal option.

It would be pretty neat to do this from within XBMC, but I should point out, it's also possible to extract the subs, add something like this and then remux the sub as a stylized sub (SSA). Hmm, maybe I'll throw together a little guide on how to do that..

Did Ned Scott ever explain how to do this?
Does anyone here know what he had in mind? How we could do it manually ourselves?
Cheers

EDIT:
Okay, I found some more info by googling.
Apparently ASS/SSA support this feature called BorderStyle and it can draw a black background for the subs.
http://fileformats.wikia.com/wiki/SubStation_Alpha
We just need to change it to 3 like this:

[V4+ Styles]
Format: Name, Fontname, Fontsize, PrimaryColour, SecondaryColour, OutlineColour, BackColour, Bold, Italic, Underline, StrikeOut, ScaleX, ScaleY, Spacing, Angle, BorderStyle, Outline, Shadow, Alignment, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Encoding
Style: Default,Arial,16,&Hffffff,&Hffffff,&H0,&H0,0,0,0,0,100,100,0,0,3,1,0,2,10,10,10,0

In order to do that we need to take an SRT subtitle, make sure it's in UTF-8 and then use something like ffmpeg to convert from SRT into ASS.
Let's say that we want to convert sub1.srt to ASS. Just use:

Code:

file -bi sub1.srt

If it says it's in anything else but UTF-8 (say iso8859-1) I still need to convert to UTF-8 using:

Code:

iconv.exe -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 sub1.srt > sub1-utf8.srt

Then I need to delete the original non UTF-8 file:

Code:

rm sub1.srt

...and rename sub1-utf8.srt back to sub1.srt

Code:

mv sub1-utf8.srt sub1.srt

To convert from SRT to ASS I need to run:

Code:

ffmpeg -i sub1.srt sub1.ass

And finally, find the borderstyle value and change it with something like sed:

Code:

sed -i '9s/.*/Style: Default,Arial,28,\&Hffffff,\&Hffffff,\&H0,\&H0,0,0,0,0,100,100,0,0,3,1,0,2,10,10,10,0/' sub1.ass

This would change font size to 28 and make a black border around the subs by changing the whole 9th line of the ASS file with a different version.

Could all this be somehow compressed and optimized into a one liner?
Could it be possible that all these commands come on every linux box and on every LibreELEC/OpenELEC?
Windows doesn't come with these, right? And Android?
Could it be possible for someone with coding skills to come up with something similar as an addon?
XBMC would use the regular subtitles mechanism that we have today. It would download an SRT file from a site like opensubtitles.org and then it would apply all this nonsense and in the end we would have readable subs on very bright videos. Far from optimal, it's a shitty hack and it uses full black instead of gray or semi transparent layer on top of the video but at least it would be readable...
Anyone one with proper skills want to chime in here?
Cheers

Have you taken a look at the CleanSubs addon? According to this post he's added that feature. It doesn't seem to be working for me but then I could be misunderstanding what he's doing with his addon. Thoughts?

Thank you for trying to make this happen in the only way still open to us. I've given up on trying to do officially but if it can be automated to make all subs appear ike we want that would be awesome!