Is there any way to improve the subtitle rendering capabilities of Totem? The subtitles positioning seems to be hard-coded in it and even though the style is user-customizable, it does not confirm to the formatting in subtitle data. In some scenes where writings appear, the subtitles are supposed to appear next to those along with what is being said at that moment. However, on those scenes the translations of text onscreen appears on the default subtitle area with nothing about the things being said.
The correct rendering are according to the open-source Windows video player, Media Player Classic – Home Cinema. There is no Linux port as far as I'm aware.
If VLC's subtitle support is the same as in Windows, it won't work for me, period.
Please suggest anyway to improve subtitle rendering in Totem, other video players, or a way to port MPC-HC.
Update
I've determined that the subtitle rendering issue is not video player-specific. As suggested in the answers, I tried MPlayer, and again the subtitle formatting was overridden by default settings somewhere. I ran SMPlayer in Windows with the same videos, but this issue is not reproducible on it.
Update
SMPlayer on Ubuntu renders subtitles perfectly. I am at a loss to understand why the core MPlayer could not do so. Additionally, anyone know how to disable the while seek bar that appears in the center when moving forward/backward?
Update
With my interaction on MPlayer's mailing list, I discovered that -ass flag is required for correct ASS/SSA subtitle rendering.
Best Answer
I would suggest using MPlayer. It's a really nice, feature-rich player, but often beginners have problem with the interface (CLI based by design) and the "too many possibilities" (which is also the result of being feature-rich player btw). "Raw MPlayer" (without frontends) allows you to position your subtitles with keys 'r' and 't', also you can try key 'a' to modify alignment. You can also learn about options and default keybindings by typing
man mplayerwithin terminal. You can also visit the documentation of MPlayer at MPlayer's site: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/MPlayer.htmlYou can also try to use many of the GUI based frontends written for MPlayer, like SMPlayer, Gnome mplayer, etc. MPlayer has its own GUI too, some people say it's not so good as some frontends though. On default install it can be launched with command 'gmplayer' or by looking the menu item showing installed softwares (make sure you haven't tried the nogui version - from the package name - because it has not got GUI support compiled in!).
About your question: mplayer can use TTF fonts, shaded/antialiased, positioned, etc as subtitles, so as far as I can imagine it should be enough for your needs, if usability is not a problem at least :)