Hi, Gang,
After reading the latest threads about how to get VLC 2 installed and getting it installed, I did some test viewings. Y'all already know I love anime' and Japanese film in general, and I occasionally watch stuff in Russian (mainly film clips on aviation in Russia). Subtitles are important for me (and for some other folks here, too).
I found playback of .avi, .mkv, .flv, and .mp4 were generally acceptable (and some were of exceptional viewing quality), but support for Substation Alpha and Advanced Substation Alpha subtitles (.ssa and .ass [yeah, that's really the extension used for them
]) is lacking now when it worked just fine using the plug-in for the old version. This presents a problem, because these formats are quite popular, and are used to encode a lot of bundled-in soft subs, especially in .mkv format which sees wide use because it can support multiple sub tracks and multiple audio (and video) tracks in a single container.
Presently subtitles in .srt format are all I can get to work. Subtitle Editor will convert the problematic formats to .srt, but that's time and effort that doesn't really need to be spent. Is there any way to use the old Substation Alpha plug-in with the new VLC? Failing that, we will have to wait for a later upgrade to address this.
It's not the end of the world for me, because I find that Mplayer/SMplayer meet most of my needs, and Xine takes care of the rest, but for some who rely on VLC as their primary player, this could be something of a headache.
Checking in at videolan.org and reading the release notes, I see mention of support for Substation Alpha subs was supposed to have been improved, so perhaps I'm overlooking something? I don't know why they would say that when the message I receive while viewing states:
No suitable decoder module:VLC does not support the audio or video format "ssa ". Unfortunately there is no way for you to fix this.
Before getting into mediainfo dumps and so forth, I'm wondering if there's something I missed that is not enabled by default?
Thanks for any insights, folks.
Later On,
D
