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wswartzendruber
15th April 2020, 04:15
I've been investigating the most robust way to rip graphical PGS subtitles into Matroska. I'm in the mood to study spec sheets and write code. I want to be able to adjust scale and crop, after all. But I'd like to rip to a well-supported, royalty-free format. You can call it idealism, if you like.

So here's the rundown:

1. SRT - text only
2. ASS - doesn't support PNG and mkvmerge supposedly converts file attachments to be separate Matroska attachments.
3. USF - graphical support was never added.
4. PGS - proprietary, and I can't find any documentation saying Matroska officially supports this
5. Kate - supports text, graphics, and everything under the sun

The problem I have with Kate is that I can't get anything with Kate subtitles in them to actually show up in either VLC or Kodi. Elephant's Dream is available with Kate subtitles and they don't show up even when I select them. I muxed my own that I converted from SRT using kateenc, and those don't appear, even though the language code shows up in the subtitle selection.

Kate seems like a silver bullet for all subtitle use cases but nothing wants to show it. What gives?

amichaelt
15th April 2020, 04:30
4. PGS - proprietary, and I can't find any documentation saying Matroska officially supports this

mkvtoolnix has supported Blu-ray subtitles (S_HDMV/PGS) since something like 2010.

filler56789
15th April 2020, 05:55
............
5. Kate - supports text, graphics, and everything under the sun

............

What gives?

Apparently kate suxxx because it was originally designed for the Ogg container, which of course does sukk by definition...

https://wiki.xiph.org/index.php?title=OggKate

I stopped using VLC ages ago and I have no idea whether its recent builds include libkate :confused:

Boulder
15th April 2020, 06:18
Definitely use the PGS subs if you mux to Matroska. Works fine in any player that supports the container.