A new proposed open standard for all current subtitle formats

[moffy]

Movie subtitles either DVD, Bluray or broadcast are split into 3 major formats:
1. DVD subtitles, which when ripped are saved as sub/idx files.
2. PGS subtitles, which when ripped are saved as a sup file.
3. TEXT subtitles, which are typically saved as a srt file, but there are many other formats also.

I am proposing a single format/file which can incorporate all of the above while being an open standard, with a library of C language utilities for dealing with converting the above formats to the new one, as well as reading and editing the new format. I have a provisional three letter acronym 'SBS', which is just an abreviation of 'subtitles'.

With the SBS format it would be possible to incorporate TEXT, DVD and PGS subtitles along with their respective palettes into a single file/stream. Each subtitle stream would have its own ID from 1 to 255, as well as a language ID. Start and End times would be stored along with subtitle size and position as well as video size. The format can easily cope with new types of data, as at present only 7 out of the 255 types are allocated. Parsing is simplified as only the desired types need to be decoded, the others can merely be skipped. An index is also proposed which would store a text description of the stream.

Both the DVD and PGS subtitles would be strored in their RLE encoded form. TEXT should be stored as UTF8.

Attached is a file 'sbs_0_5.zip' which has very preliminary C files on the SBS format. I am opening up the format for comment as I am by no means an expert and would appreciate the input of such. The plan would be to firm up the specification then create an open code project.

While I have placed copyright notices at the top of the files, this is only a temporary measure, to prevent early fragmentation, which would defeat the purpose of the proposed standard.