VobSub - confusing.

[Gew]

Hiya!

Some basic thoughts and questions.

First, I have this .idx/sub that plays fine with MPC/DirectShow/ffdshow decoder, eg. "primitive" black outlines, white fillings, just the way I want 'em to be shown.

However, just out of curiosity on compatibility and such, I tried simply dropping .idx/sub and .avi in a .MKV (using latest mkvtoolnix).

How, when playing the result .MKV with Media Player Classic, using Haali Matroska Splitter (I prefer it over Gabest, for some reasons), I get some sort of gray-coloured annoyance near the outlines, the anti-aliasing field? I'm not really sure what this is, and why it became obvious thru MKV but not thru AVI..?

Tried messing with the .IDX to overcome this little obstacle.

This seems to do the trick:

custom colors: ON, tridx: 0000, colors: FFFFFF, FFFFFF, 000000, FFFFFF

And also replacing

palette: aaaaa8, efefef, 131313, fdfdfd, b86316, d4ff34, fdfdfd, fdfdfd, fdfdfd, fdfdfd, fdfdfd, fdfdfd, fdfdfd, fdfdfd, fdfdfd, fdfdfd

with

palette: ffffff, ffffff, 000000, ffffff, ffffff, ffffff, ffffff, ffffff, ffffff, ffffff, ffffff, ffffff, ffffff, ffffff, ffffff, ffffff

One particular question that I'm interesting in finding the answer to, is why the heck there's so many colors in the palette? I mean, juding from the custom colors settings, VobSub only seems to use 4 colours, but the palette here consists of 16(!). What's up with the remaining 12? Are they blind spots?

Could I perhaps be brave and chop down my palette even more, to like:

palette: ffffff, ffffff, 000000, ffffff

Or would that break compatibility / VobSub standards, causing my subtitles not being shown at all?

As you may see, I've somewhat confuzed in all this, and could really use help! :)


Regards~
G.

[Gew]

Here's a snapshot on how the .MKV somehow gets a gray-coloured area near the outlines.

http://i39.tinypic.com/29qiqzl.jpg

I want to get rid of it.

[Gew]

After all, seems like this line gave the most satisfying result:

# The original palette of the DVD
palette: FFFFFF, FFFFFF, 000000, 000000, 000000, 000000, 000000, 000000, 000000, 000000, 000000, 000000, 000000, 000000, 000000, 000000

[Nikse555]

>Or would that break compatibility / VobSub standards...
It would probably break the dvd standard.
The 16 colors (CLUT) are defined in the .ifo file: http://www.mpucoder.com/DVD/pgc.html
And each subpicture uses indexes to the colors defined in the .ifo file: http://www.mpucoder.com/DVD/spu.html

I don't think I've seen subtitles using more than the four colors (where one is normally transparent) - but I'm sure they exists.

[0xdeadbeef]

Each subtitle frame can use 4 colors from the global PGC palette which defines 16 colors. There are 4 color indices and 4 alpha values per frame, each 4bit wide (0..15).