Posted by Gareth Halfacree on 10/24/62 11:38

Ridwan Hughes wrote:
> You'd think DVD players would have now advanced a little so they render
> subtitles with an antialised font to look a part of the film and not like
> you were reading ceefax 888 stuff.

The subtitles aren't stored as text to be rendered. On a DVD, the
subtitles are stored as a bunch of bitmap images full frame size in two
colours. The 'background colour' is the alpha channel, and is shown as
transparent. The other colour is used to bring up the subtitles.

The people who make the DVD are the ones in charge of the font used, not
the people who make the player. And *everyone* has to stick to the 'two
colour' rule, meaning no smoothing or blending (in the original image).

It's not impossible for a DVD player to perform alpha blending on the
two colour images before displaying them, but that's a very different
matter to simply programming in an anti-aliased font for display.

--
Gareth Halfacree
http://gareth.halfacree.co.uk

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