Bug#858963: Please Support Embedded WebVTT Subtitles

[Jason Self]

Package: vlc
Version: 2.2.4-1~deb8u1
Severity: wishlist

I understand that WebVTT has been adopted as the official subtitle
format for WebM videos (FFmpeg also enforces this policy by not
allowing other subtitle formats like SRT into a WebM file.) I have a
WebM file with such subtitles embedded in them, as reported by FFmpeg:

Duration: 00:01:35.98, start: 0.007000, bitrate: 458 kb/s
Stream #0:0: Video: vp9, yuv420p, 720x540, SAR 1:1 DAR 4:3, 23.98fps,
23.98 tbr, 1k tbn, 1k tbc
Stream #0:1(eng): Audio: opus, 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp (default)
Stream #0:2(eng): Subtitle: webvtt

In selecting the track from the Subtitle menu it appears that VLC does
not support embedded WebVTT. The code where it was added seems more
for external subtitle files.

I've made a feature request to add that support, which has been added
for the upcoming VLC 3.0:
http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc.git;a=commitdiff;h=5ef7a61e949c2dbfd4f149a7d108a6aea05ac3e4

This change cleanly applies to the VLC 2.2 series in Debian (I've done
this already on my machine and it works.) It would be nice if this
change could be made for the VLC in Debian so that others can easily
have access to files with these subtitles in advance of VLC 3.0.