Print

[Morien]

Hi all,
after some searching I found bits and peices of how to setup subtitle parameters from various posts, however needed to put them all together to know what I was doing. So, to save others the effort, heres how to change the subtitle parameters in XBMP 2.4. (parameters being colour. size, position... tested with OGM files).

Mplayer:
I don't really use these, as they are slightly transparent, harder to configure, etc. So take this as a rough guide. I suggest using TrueType however.
To get larger text, you'll need to download new fonts from the Mplayer download page. The url is http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design6/dload.html
Under the fonts sub-section get the 'Arial - Western (ISO 8859-1) (4 sizes)' file. It's compressed in tar format so I reccomend WinRar or something similar to extract the files.

Extract the contents of one of the folders inside. I used 'font-arial-28-iso-8859-1' (28 being the font size, you may want to go larger or smaller). In it you'll need the following files:
font.desc
iso-8859-1-a.raw
iso-8859-1-b.raw
osd-mplayer-a.raw
osd-mplayer-b.raw
Now copy these over to the XBMP root directory, overwriting the files of the same name that are already there.
Restart the Xbox and they should be larger. (Note, as far as I know, you cannot change the colour or position of Mplayer fonts.)

TrueType:
These are what I use and after some tweaking they are perfect for me.
You need only change one file for TrueType tweaking (unless you want a different font).
Open the skin.xml from the XBMP root directory in Notepad.
There are different sections of this file, each for a different video signal and frame type (PAL, NTSC, 4:3, WIDESCREEN).

(Note: NTSC res is 720x480, PAL is 720x576 and they are the same for widescreen however under widescreen it says either true or false. Eg.
   <widescreen>false</widescreen>
   <resolution>720x480</resolution>
is NTSC full frame.)

As I live in Australia and only have an old TV, it is PAL only (however plays NTSC although limited to black and white). So I'm going to change details that are under,
   <widescreen>false</widescreen>
   <resolution>720x576</resolution>
What I am going to change under this is in,
<subtitle>
     <description>Truetype subtitle parameters</description>
     <position>360,460</position>
     <fontheight>23</fontheight>
     <color>0XFFFFFFFF</color>
   </subtitle>

The position is the pixel position (Width,Height). Since the subtitles by default are in the middle of the screen virtically AND horizontally, I wish to change the Height value. Keeping overscan in mind, I changed mine to 565 (360,565). This on my TV brings the fonts down to the bottom of the visible screen with a good gap (about 15 pixels from the bottom). You may want your subtitles in a different positon, so just use trial and error.

Next is the size or font height of the subtitles. 23, to me, is originally too small to read easily, so I changed it to 28. You may like it bigger or smaller so just use trial and error.

Last is the actuall colour (or color for you americans). By default this is white, which to me is barely visible on the majority of my media, so I changed it to bright yellow. The colour is in html so yellow is FFFF00 (0XFFFF00 in the xml). For a table of html colours go to http://html-color-codes.com/ and copy and paste the appropriate colour.

So, my xml for the subtitle section looks like,
<subtitle>
     <description>Truetype subtitle parameters</description>
     <position>360,535</position>
     <fontheight>28</fontheight>
     <color>0XFFFF00</color>
   </subtitle>

which gives me my perfect subtitles. (Note: The xml won't look so aligned and neat in Notepad, it just automatically formatted when I pasted.)

Edit: I've begun to find myself switching over to use the Mplayer subs more than my custom Truetype now, so I looked into tweaking it more and so here's what I did.

Changed the Font: The original font is Arial, which isn't neccesarily bad, however is too thin for my likes, so I went into my fonts directory (C:/Windows/Fonts/ on my computer) and looked for an alternative font. I chose Arial Narrow Bold as this looked closest to the subs on the DVD I had in my Xbox at the time. Those of you who want non-English fonts, it SHOULD work if you do this (just with your chosen font). Now rename the font to subtitle-font.ttf and put it in the Media folder of your XBMP directory, overwriting the one already there.

Changed the Colour: Probably wasn't needed, however I found my old colour to be a tad rough on the eyes. So I changed it to a more pale shade of yellow (FFFF66).

Changed the Size: The font looked a bit small, and as I wanted it to match the DVD I had (Castle in the Sky, Region 1) I changed it to size 35, nice and readable.

SO, now my skin.xml has this:
   <subtitle>
     <description>Truetype subtitle parameters</description>
     <position>360,535</position>
     <fontheight>35</fontheight>
     <color>0XFFFF66</color>
   </subtitle>
and my subs use the Arial Narrow Bold font.


Hope this helps some people.
If I have written anything wrong, or there are more tips (border colour/depth perhaps, which is REALLY needed) than please feel free to add. This worked perfect for me though (Mplayer has large subtitles and TrueType has large, yellow, perfectly aligned subtitles).

Morien

This post has been edited by Morien: Jan 21 2004, 04:20 AM