[hsinchu308]

Hi,

I am using xbmc-r32375-Dharma on an Acer Revo R3610 (Windows 7 32 bit, Chinese edition). With the recent fix in subtitle rendering, displaying English subtitles no longer make the video stutter or pixelate. However, displaying (traditional) Chinese subtitles still make the video stutter/pixelate when a subtitle first appear. My question: with Dharma nearly done, is there any plan to improve subtitle rendering speed, either by buffering ahead, or changing the subtitle rendering resolution (to be different from display resolution), like in MPC-HC? I think the current method, where characters are buffered after the initial appearance, works well for languages like English, but not for eastern languages like Chinese or Japanese.

Right now I use the DSPlayer branch and set the subtitle resolution to 960 by 540, and the video does not stutter at all when displaying Chinese subtitles (the subtitle engine renders the characters about 10 seconds ahead of the video).

[treefour]

Hi,

I am using xbmc-r32375-Dharma on an Acer Revo R3610 (Windows 7 32 bit, Chinese edition). With the recent fix in subtitle rendering, displaying English subtitles no longer make the video stutter or pixelate. However, displaying (traditional) Chinese subtitles still make the video stutter/pixelate when a subtitle first appear. My question: with Dharma nearly done, is there any plan to improve subtitle rendering speed, either by buffering ahead, or changing the subtitle rendering resolution (to be different from display resolution), like in MPC-HC? I think the current method, where characters are buffered after the initial appearance, works well for languages like English, but not for eastern languages like Chinese or Japanese.

Right now I use the DSPlayer branch and set the subtitle resolution to 960 by 540, and the video does not stutter at all when displaying Chinese subtitles (the subtitle engine renders the characters about 10 seconds ahead of the video).

I'm not gonna be of help to you on this, but but I have in interest in this and thought I would pass some info along. I also use Traditional Chinese subs(not unicode though) on a vista system, but haven't had any stuttering/pixalating problems. I have always used the main branch rather than the dsplayer branch. At the moment I am using xbmc-r32660-Dharma.exe from the nightly builds, with no problem.

Have you tried the nightly builds at http://mirrors.xbmc.org/nightlies/win32/? I haven't had any problems, yet.

[hsinchu308]

I'm not gonna be of help to you on this, but but I have in interest in this and thought I would pass some info along. I also use Traditional Chinese subs(not unicode though) on a vista system, but haven't had any stuttering/pixalating problems. I have always used the main branch rather than the dsplayer branch. At the moment I am using xbmc-r32660-Dharma.exe from the nightly builds, with no problem.

Have you tried the nightly builds at http://mirrors.xbmc.org/nightlies/win32/? I haven't had any problems, yet.

I downloaded the latest nightly, xbmc-r32660-Dharma.exe, but don't see any improvement in subtitle rendering versus the xbmc-r32375-Dharma.exe nightly I was using before. Thanks for your info though. I'll keep your hardware config in mind the next time I buy a desktop PC.

[treefour]

I'll keep your hardware config in mind the next time I buy a desktop PC.

I wouldn't, this Asus is a piece of S&@#, always breaking down.

I find it odd that your subs aren't working correctly though, as I put together a system for the wife's family who are Chinese (from Hsinchu) and need the subs for everything, from old pc parts I had lying around and it works fine as well. At least no complaints lately. :p

[ngok]

same problem here,with appletv+crystalhd card.
English sub runs smooth but Chinese sub is stuttering.
Chinese has too many charecters to buffer,the player has to read disk every time a sentense appear.the whole font must be load to memory to render smoothly.

[BGilman]

Yes, I've taken a look through the source, and my first guess is that freetype/the internal caching system is have a tough time handling large character sets( GB has 3755 chars, which most likely aren't caching very well ).

I'm still compiling macports dependencies at this point though, I need to do some profiling to be sure.

The good news, is that is certainly looks like there is room for large improvement for subtitle rendering performance across the board( including english ).

The bad news however, is that I'm nowhere near familiar enough with XBMC's source code to make those kind of large improvements, at least at for now( I'd spend more time fixing things that I broke than actually improving anything ).

So I'm just going to try to get chinese subtitle rendering performance up to where it was, before people started having issues.