ASS subs in matroska

[moko]

Lately I see a few rips with ASS subs in them and was wondering what's with that? I can't get them to work in BSPlayer even though it asks me to load the fonts (are they actually muxed in the file?), it works only in VLC which I don't really want to use... what's wrong with just putting good old standard SRT subs in the files?

[Milvus]

ASS advantages are many : you can choose the style of the text (font face, color, bold, italic, size, position, rotation, etc...), add karaoke, even drawings... It also support Unicode encoding. Anbd yes, the font can be embedded in the file (with MKV).

To play this kind of file, drop BSPlayer (broken player) and take a modern player : ZoomPlayer, Media Player Classic and MPlayer are good examples of such players.

[moko]

I just figured out ASS is actually an improved version of SSA which I used quite a lot in the past. even though it has some advantages it certainly has some cons as well, mostly the need for the embedded fonts and the fact that it's not widely supported like SRT. I don't really see the need for all the styling, anyone can just select the font they like and use it but on the other hand the unicode support sure is useful. I'm really eager to see standalone matroska players in the (hopefully near) future and hope it'll support this format, but I think that even for the sake of PC compatibility I'll convert the subs to SRT and remux the file.
BTW, I've seen that mkvextract can demux the embedded fonts from the file but mkvmerge can't mux them into it so I was wondering what program is used for it? and are the fonts really have to be muxed?

[LeMoi]

BTW, I've seen that mkvextract can demux the embedded fonts from the file but mkvmerge can't mux them into it so I was wondering what program is used for it? and are the fonts really have to be muxed?

It can, just add the desired font as attachment :)

[Milvus]

I just figured out ASS is actually an improved version of SSA which I used quite a lot in the past. even though it has some advantages it certainly has some cons as well, mostly the need for the embedded fonts and the fact that it's not widely supported like SRT.

SSA/ASS support is quite good in the computer world (VSFilter and MPlayer), but it's true I have no idea of its support on SAP. Probably very basic...

I don't really see the need for all the styling, anyone can just select the font they like and use it but on the other hand the unicode support sure is useful.

Matter of taste, of course.

I'm really eager to see standalone matroska players in the (hopefully near) future and hope it'll support this format, but I think that even for the sake of PC compatibility I'll convert the subs to SRT and remux the file.


Note that you could (and should, for compatibiliy purpose) add in the same file several subtitle tracks. So you can make your rips with VobSub, SRT and ASS/SSA tracks, and pick one during playback depending on your mood and the player you're using.

[foxyshadis]

The need for embedded fonts? Those are purely optional, and will be replaced with a system font (usually arial, ASS has no font priority list as far as I know, very unfortunate but an obvious artifact of its history) if there's a font loading problem. That's not what's preventing the file from loading for you.