[mythtv-users] Subtitle fonts

[f-myth-users at media.mit.edu]

    > Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2018 14:19:11 -0400
    > From: "Michael T. Dean" <mtdean at thirdcontact.com>

    > On 06/04/2018 01:34 PM, Jan Ceuleers wrote:
    > > Hello
    > >
    > > I've set up a new frontend, and it doesn't display subtitles when I play
    > > videos (ripped DVDs). I suspect that this is because the required font
    > > is not installed.
    > >
    > > How do I find out which font(s) I should install?

    > DVD subtitles are done via images embedded in the DVD data, not via text 
    > streams and fonts.  I don't think any DVD ripping software can create a 
    > ripped DVD with any kind of useful (closed) subtitles--doing so would 
    > require using an optical character recognition program to generate text 
    > from the images that could be embedded in a normal (non-DVD-image) 
    > subtitle stream.

That's not true.

Some DVDs also encode subtitles in a way that (for example) Handbrake
can embed directly in the output stream, often in multiple languages.
I can give examples if you're in doubt.  Handbrake is -not- doing OCR;
these are actual separate CC streams, which some DVDs include and some
don't.  Tools such as mkvmerge can then be run on the output file (the
mkv written be Handbrake) to identify such tracks after being passed
through via --subtitle-* args to Handbrake, and mkvextract can turn
such tracks into SRT's, which mplayer (for example) will then display,
and which can be turned on or off using mplayer's normal subtitle-
control keyboard shortcuts, such as j.  So they are definitely (often
or usually) there on the original DVD, and they are -not- burned into
the video on the DVD.  (Whether Handbrake burns them in or provides
them as a separate stream is up to the options supplied to Handbrake.)

Different versions of Handbrake will identify these tracks in different
ways when producing its logfile while scanning tracks.  I believe, for
instance, that Handbrake 1.1.0 changed the way it talks about subtitles
from "(iso639-2: eng)" to "English, Closed Caption [CC608]" and variants
such as "English Closed Caption (Wide Screen) [VOBSUB]" and "English
Closed Caption (Letterbox) [VOBSUB]".  But they -are- there, in a pretty
good percentage of DVDs.