Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

The quest to get the subtitle colors correct continues. Xine shows different colors when viewing the VOB file than playing the DVD. Ogle shows the same colors (black/black) regardless except it won’t play when no audio device is available. This was fixed by adding this to ~/.oglerc

<ogle_conf>

	<audio>

	<device>

		<driver>null</driver>

	</device>

	</audio>

</ogle_conf>

I read through the dvdauthor documentation and it says if the subtitles come from spumux, the color palette will be passed. If not, you can specify it as such in your project.xml file:

<pgc palette="subtitle.rgb">

	<vob file="project-sub.mpeg" />

</pgc>

Here is the subtitle.rgb file with values that match the defaults set in xste’s global subtitle palette.

000000

EBEBEB

101010

FFFFFF

FF0000

00FF00

0000FF

FFFF00

FF00FF

00FFFF

EB8A00

20D9FF

51A92D

FDBD00

FFF5AD

7D7D81

That did the trick!

I got a nice email back from Jan Panteltje, the author of xste. He’s adding in more error messages and the frame rate fix into his next release, so hopefully fewer people will be hitting themselves in the head ;-).

He also answered a question I had regarding the colors of the subtitles. I was getting different colors than what I had specified in xste. This isn’t related to xste, but the player. He’s had success with Ogle and standalone players, but color problems with Xine and MPlayer. Specifically, he said MPlayer uses it’s own colors. I’m getting all-black subtitles in Xine and Ogle, but white with grey outlines in MPlayer.

I tried to test out the DVD in my standalone player, a Pioneer DV-414 (more than three years old). The first disk I burned on DVD+RW played on this machine, to my surprise, but this one doesn’t. The difference is this movie has subtitles (probably not it) and this movie is made up of three parts. Neither had a menu. Also, the second movie was rewritten over the same disk. I’ll try reburning a single title DVD and burning to a fresh DVD+RW.

The reburned single-title DVD played, but the picture was broken up badly–the DV-414 was struggling to read it. Maybe I got lucky getting it to read the first DVD+RW. On the hypothesis that a re-burned DVD is harder to read for an older player (just a guess, really), I burned a freshly formatted DVD+RW. This played fine. After a few more tests, I’m of the opinion that reburning a disk makes it harder for my older player to read it. It doesn’t have anything to do with presence of subtitles, multiple titles or anything like that. The first burn plays fine, but subsequent burns either don’t play at all or have that nasty, broken-up, highly pixelated video.

As for the subtitles, my Pioneer is showing them all-black, just like Xine and Ogle. This leads me to believe Xine, Ogle and my standalone player are fine and MPlayer is doing its own thing. Oh, to play from the DVD:

xine -u 0

If the control window doesn’t show up, right click in the video window and select GUI visibility. Then click DVD in the control window.

ogle /dev/dvd

Turn on subtitles on the control window. It’s the icon second from the right on the bottom row (just left of the movie camera icon).

mplayer -sid 0 /dev/dvd

Nice, except you can’t rely on the colors it displays.