Alpha tools for USF subtitles, available for testing ....

[Kaiousama]

Hi All,

the USF and matroska dev teams are proud to annouce, that finally the first alpha testing of tools to create, mux and play USF subtitles in/from MKV files are now being made available to the public. We encourage you to give it a shot, but also clearly give advice to not consider using these tools for final backups of your movies yet, as some minor things may still have to be changed with respect to how USF subs are best being stored in MKV files.

Here is what you need :

USF Editors :

ChronoSub
U96

Both are in pretty much alpha state still, but you will be surprised about the current status of support for SRT/SSA conversion into USF, as well as creating subs with advanced USF features already.

Muxers :

mkvmerge

Currently only mkvmerge support muxing of USF subs, but AMG will hopefully soon offer it also.

Hardcoders :

PicSubU

Avisynth filter to hardcode your USF subtitles into the videoclip.

Playback :

PixiShow
Haali Splitter

Based on unmei's pixifier, the first and only lib for USF rendering ( written in Delphi ), kaiousama created his USF rendering DShow filter. Expect still a number of bugs in it, but its working pretty stable already on some machines here and no major issues have been reported with it from the dev team testing it.

Note that USF playback will only work correctly on DirectShow based players when both PixiShow and Haali's latest matroska splitter are being present on your system.

and now ....... Happy Testing !!!

[Kurtnoise]

First of all, great stuff Kaiousama... It's nice to see that USF is not dead.

I've a question : I tested usf embedded into some mkv files. The playback works great if I uninstall VSFilter. If I let VSFilter + PixiShow, all dshow players crash unfortunately. So, is there an issue with VSFilter ? here is a sample if you want to test by yourself.

Second : could you define with more details the rasterizer functions ? Thanks.

[Kaiousama]

I tested usf embedded into some mkv files. The playback works great if I uninstall VSFilter. If I let VSFilter + PixiShow, all dshow players crash unfortunately. So, is there an issue with VSFilter ? here is a sample if you want to test by yourself.

You're not the only reporting an issue when VSFilter is installed, i need to do investigations about the possible causes; unfortunately on my workstation I do not experience any crashes when VSFilter 3.36 and PixiShow are both installed, so bug-tracking is not so simple (your test file renders correctly on my system).

Please try also the new build I uploaded last evening (PixiShow_20050619), it solves a loading priority issue when concurrent loading between PixiShow and VSFilter occurr.

Another known issue is that one related to Media Player Classic users, they have to deselect MPC internal matroska splitter because it forces VSFilter loading even when PixiShow is the preferred filter.

Another bug-report/solving involves ffdshow settings, actually you need to enable "allow output format changes during playback" in Output section, and (probably) you have to limit output colorspace to RGB32 since it is the only colorspace supported by PixiShow at the moment (YV12 is planned).

Second : could you define with more details the rasterizer functions ?

PixiShow preferences are highly unstable and prone to changes, you can try out them by yourself, i'll provide full documentation when i'll decide what to keep and what to trash.

Thank you for the feedback, and Happy testing.

btw. Very nice gui your BeLight, especially when you need to teach other prople to use besweet.

[Kurtnoise]

Hi,

Originally Posted by Kaiousama

your test file renders correctly on my system

FYI : with the 20050617_alpha version, I can render the file w/o problem. The issue occurs when we play the file.

Originally Posted by Kaiousama

Please try also the new build I uploaded last evening (PixiShow_20050619), it solves a loading priority issue when concurrent loading between PixiShow and VSFilter occurr.

I tried this new release and the problem has changed... The players don't crash anymore but the subtitles stream (usf at least) isn't taken into account. I solved this problem by disabling the VSFilter autoloading in the Haali Splitter. Hope this helps...

Originally Posted by Kaiousama

Another known issue is that one related to Media Player Classic users, they have to deselect MPC internal matroska splitter because it forces VSFilter loading even when PixiShow is the preferred filter.

Well...it's not a problem anymore. Ask them to check "Disable Matroska Splitter in MPC" when they install the Haali Splitter. There is a function to uncheck the splitter now.

Originally Posted by Kaiousama

btw. Very nice gui your BeLight, especially when you need to teach other prople to use besweet.

[LeMoi]

Kaiousama, waiting for you on IRC to complete what we didn't have to finish last time ^^

[Skaarj]

I have found the reason on which at me do not work embeeded subtitles created in U96

<text alignment="TopCenter"><font color="#FFE1E1E1" size="-2">text<font color="#FFD20000">text</font></font></text> - All players crash
<text alignment="TopCenter"><font color="#FFE1E1E1" size="-2">text</font><font color="#FFD20000">text</font></text> - All ok

<text><i><font face="Arial" family="Arial"><font color="#FFDFDF9F">text</font></font></i></text> - All players crash
<text><i><font face="Arial" family="Arial" color="#FFDFDF9F">text</font></i></text> - All ок

[unmei]

ouch! Thanks for pointing this out, Skaarj.
I _thought_ it would work with nested tags (at least "at reasonable levels", let's say 5 deep or so), but apparently i recently broke something here.

As this looks quite serious, i'll be attacking this as one of the next problem. I can't guarantee it will be fixed next week as the parser for these tags is a bit of brainkiller part of code, but i will defintly look into it.

[unmei]

OK, we took your text nodes and pasted them into an otherwise working sample file. It worked perfectly both on mine and kaiousama's machine.

Either the problem lies somewhere else in your file (are your files UTF-8 encoded?) or in your system (operating system? - we only use XP, it should work on W2K tho - ME is unclear) or maybe even other filter interfering (i got triple subs and flipped video - but no crash - when VSFilter has the "load external files" enabled).

[Skaarj]

I checked at myself and at friends when at embeeded subtitles there is "</font></font>" all players and graphedt too crash, in external subtitles wоrks fine.

All other my experiments have passed successfully, and I tested Embedded USF with RUBY http://usf.subforge.net/20050625.php too perfectly works.

[unmei]

oh i didn't realize that you were specifically encountering the bug when the file is embedded. We only tested it with an external file. But this means it definitly isn't an issue in the core (*phew* for me..) but now i wonder how that would make a difference - either the usf is already truncated when muxing into USF, or kaiousama somehow doesn't pass all data to the rasterizer when he recieves the subtitle from the splitter (as opposed to him reading it from a usf file).

[Kaiousama]

Originally Posted by Skaarj

I checked at myself and at friends when at embeeded subtitles there is "</font></font>" all players and graphedt too crash, in external subtitles wоrks fine.

Bug traced!
The problem is not unmei's renderer nor my filter, the problem arises when you mux the file into mkv with mkvmerge, probably mosu's xml reformatter commit errors during line creation, so that a line like this:

<text alignment="TopCenter"><font color="#FFE1E1E1" size="-2">text<font color="#FFD20000">text</font></font></text>

after being muxed in .mkv becomes like this (dumped from my filter's input pin):

<text alignment="TopCenter"><font color="#FFE1E1E1" size="-2">text<font color="#FFD20000">text</font/></text>

I'll report the bug to mosu as soon as possible.

All other my experiments have passed successfully, and I tested Embedded USF with RUBY http://usf.subforge.net/20050625.php too perfectly works.

Nice example!

[Kaiousama]

Bug solved!

in order to mux your usf files into matroska container, please use this mkvmerge build.

Thank you for the feedback.

[Skaarj]

With the new mkvtoolnix all perfectly works without bugs.

[Kaiousama]

Another bug squashed!

spaces between nodes inside the <text>...</text> were stripped by mkvmerge's reformatter, now they're all preserved (so be careful and don't apply pretty xml formatting to nodes inside <text>...</text> )

you can download the updated mkvmerge build from here

Happy testing.

[Kaiousama]

Originally Posted by LeMoi

Kaiousama, waiting for you on IRC to complete what we didn't have to finish last time ^^

I hope i found & solved the problem you explained to me via IRC, please try the new Pixishow_20050626-2 build.

new in this build:

- YUY2 color space support
- UYVY color space support
- Fixed a VideoInfoHeader related bug that caused acess violation when a subtitle needs to be rendered.

Happy download!

[darkavatar1470]

wow, putting hiragana on top of kanji is way too cool, very useful for karaoke subs...
I'm wondering if it's possible to do so with ASS ?

[Skaarj]

It is possible to use in subtitles a pictures from attachments?

[unmei]

Skaari, in this way "no".
But USF can have embedded pictures. And even if external pictures do not yet get muxed and used, the embedded ones should IMO, since they are part of the XML data. The muxer only has to mux everyting in the USF file, the splitter to pass everything downstream and the rasteriser does all the rest. This way they don't need to know there are pictures. BUT this is not very efficient because you have to "text-encode" the pictures (base64) which makes them larger, and they will get stored in a place where it may not be appropriate to store large chunks of data (that prefixed, "inline" embedded pictures in the <image> node itself may become interesting at some time..).

I committed code to use embedded pictures in USF last weekend and kaiou made a build using it. AFAIK they plan to put embedded (and probably also formerly external) pictures into the attachments on muxing, BUT i guess it won't work by you adding the picture manually to the attachment.

Note that i do no muxed tests, but since i assume muxing will not throw away what is inside USF, i think this (hard) way should also already work for muxed USF: convert all pictures to base64 encoded files (i think mkvtoolnix has a tool for it, else u96 0.1.9 versions also can do it with file->inc man) and then copy those "text" files into the USF in the <embedded> node.

I *thought* u96 could encode and embed the pictures in one step but unfortunately i didnt rember how to do it when i did the pixifier test last weekend (thus i now only know to do it with a text editor ).

An example how this should look:
(Assuming the base64 encoded file is the string "ABCDEFGH")

<subtitles>
<subtitle start=".." stop="..">
<image alignment="TopRight">mylogo.bmp</image>
</subtitle>
</subtitles>

<embedded>
<b64file filetype="image/bmp" colorkey="#FFFFFF" filename="mylogo.bmp">ABCDEFGH</b64file>
</embedded>

of course, the base64 encoded file will be a bit longer than only 8 characters... (typically 4/3 the size of the original picture file)
also, the filetype can be "image" or a mime-type or completly left out.
The colorkey attribute defined a color in the picture to be replaced with transparent - of course this is only meaningful for files without transparency - and IMO it is preferrable to use PNG pictures with alpha-transparency instread of the clumsy colorkey :Y.

[LeMoi]

And is it possible to use embedded fonts ?

[unmei]

not yet. I was working on it (weekends are so damn short..) but i don't know yet if it will ever work. I do not want to install the font in windows, but there is a API call to load a font just for the running process - if that turns out working, they could be implemented soon - else probably never.

Also, a sample of embedded pictures:
screenshot and source usf