Bug#613550: smplayer: -subcp (default subtitles encoding) can confuse ASS renderer (huge sub fonts)

[Thibaut VARENE]

Package: smplayer
Version: 0.6.9-1
Severity: normal
Tags: upstream

First off, I'm not sure whether that's a smplayer, mplayer or libass (or
any combinaison of the above) bug.

Here's the analysis:

SMplayer passes a -subcp option to the mplayer process, relative to the user
defined setting in Preferences->Subtitles->Encoding.

It seems that by default (at least it was for me), this setting is "Western
European Languages (ISO-8859-1)".

Trying to play /certain/ files (and I can make available such a file) with
this configuration triggers the following bug:

In smplayer's output console, one can see near the end:
[ass] Neither PlayResX nor PlayResY defined. Assuming 384x288

And the subtitles font will appear very large on the screen.

Discarding that option (i.e. not specifying any -subcp option) or setting it
to the correct value (UTF-8 in this case) makes the bug go away.

For a reason that escapes me, it seems that setting an incorrect subcp will
confuse libass, making it ignore PlayResX/PlayResY from the ASS stream and thus
mess up the subtitle display.

Until that bug is fixed, I suggest avoiding to pass -subcp at all (make the
setting optional with a checkbox or something...)

HTH

T-Bone

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 6.0
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages smplayer depends on:
ii  libc6         2.11.2-10                  Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  libgcc1       1:4.4.5-8                  GCC support library
ii  libqt4-networ 4:4.6.3-4                  Qt 4 network module
ii  libqt4-xml    4:4.6.3-4                  Qt 4 XML module
ii  libqtcore4    4:4.6.3-4                  Qt 4 core module
ii  libqtgui4     4:4.6.3-4                  Qt 4 GUI module
ii  libstdc++6    4.4.5-8                    The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
ii  mplayer       2:1.0~rc3++final.dfsg1-1   movie player for Unix-like systems
ii  zlib1g        1:1.2.3.4.dfsg-3           compression library - runtime

Versions of packages smplayer recommends:
ii  smplayer-themes            0.1.20+dfsg-1 complete front-end for MPlayer - i
ii  smplayer-translations      0.6.9-1       complete front-end for MPlayer - t

smplayer suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information