Aegisub dev Blog on Aegisub

Aegisub 3.4.0 Released

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 14:04:00 -0800

It’s been a while!

This release, the first stable in a decade, was designed to have minimal feature changes from 3.2.2. The goal was to just cut a release that builds on modern systems, which by itself was more than enough work. Further releases will include actual features and more normal changelogs. The version is 3.4.0 to avoid conflicts with forks that tagged things under 3.3.x.

Moving forward, development will continue out of TypesettingTools/Aegisub. arch1t3cht has done a great job of running the primary fork used over the past few years, and now has commit access in TypesettingTools so that he can work out of a more centralized repository. We’d love to get all the work done across various forks back into the mainline repository, so please send PRs!

3.1.0 beta

Mon, 16 Dec 2013 03:26:00 +0000

There are still some issues to sort out, but 3.1 is largely complete so I thought it’d be good to release a beta version for people to play with. If you encounter crashes or other bugs, please report them at http://devel.aegisub.org/wiki/NewTicket. I cannot fix bugs which I am not aware of. If you have comments or complaints about changes, post them on the forums.

Barring major issues, I hope to release the final version of 3.1.0 in two weeks or so.

Aegisub 3.0.3 Released

Sat, 29 Jun 2013 04:53:00 +0100

Mostly just some assorted bug fixes, a new UI translation (Dutch), and updates to the Arabic and Finnish translations. As usual the changelog can be found here.

This release is the first one in a while to have an official Linux binary, since Debian still doesn’t package any versions of wxWidgets released in the last two years. It’s somewhat experimental, but should work on all relatively recent Debian-based Linux distributions (Ubuntu 12.04 and Debian Wheezy being the oldest versions I’ve tested).

Aegisub 3.0.1 Released

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 04:35:00 +0100

This is just a quick maintenance release to package up some updates to the translations which were too late for 3.0.0 and fix some easy-to-fix bugs that were reported after 3.0.0 was released. See the changelog for more details.

Aegisub 3.0.0 Released

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 16:50:00 +0100

Back in 2009, it was becoming increasingly clear that Aegisub’s code base was becoming an unmaintainable mess, and so following the release of 2.1.7 development was split into two branches: 2.1.8 was to be a minor bug fix release, while 2.2.0 would Fix All The Problems. This, of course, turned out to be wildly overambitious. 2.2.0 ended up involving rewriting substantial portions of the program, and was eventually renamed 3.0.0 (after briefly being 2.5.0).

A bit of statistics

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 20:26:00 +0000

As you may know, we have an automatic update checker in Aegisub, you may have noticed it telling you about the 2.1.9 release yesterday.

When we check for updates, we also send a little bit of anonymous system information back, to get an idea of what kind of systems Aegisub is being used on. This allows us to make some basic statistics. Here’s a few facts:

In the past 35 hours, about 20,000 checks for updates have been made, in other words, Aegisub gets started more than 550 times an hour, or 13,500 times a day, worldwide. Of course, this only counts those who have automatic update checking enabled.

Aegisub 2.1.9 released

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 08:36:00 +0000

Here.

Sorry about the delays.

FAQ:

Q: Why all those delays? A: First it was blamed on laziness. Then, FFmpegSource 2.17 was getting incredibly close to release and it was thought it was best to wait for those. Then when that happened an older problem resurfaced, not having sufficient access to the servers. All of this was finally resolved yesterday.

Q: So what’s new? A: Lots of stuff, although most of it is just bug fixes. See the changelog on the main site.

Call for translators

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 03:59:00 +0100

Version 2.1.9 is still getting closer to being ready for release, although there’s still some actual issues needing, at the very least, testing.

However, there are some user interface languages we had in 2.1.8 or earlier versions, where the translator has gone missing, or just hasn’t responded to my mail.

Catalan (Eduard)
Farsi (Meysam)
~~Korean (unknown)~~
~~Polish (Adam)~~
~~Vietnamese (Hung NGUYEN, OnEsChi)~~
~~Chinese, both Traditional and Simplified (mkboy2)~~

If you are one of the people listed here I would appreciate if you could contact me. If you otherwise speak one of these languages well and want to help, I would also love to hear so.

Not dead yet

Sun, 05 Jun 2011 01:45:00 +0100

Aegisub is still alive!

Recently I’ve seen people asking whether Aegisub is dead, or what is happening, so it’s probably a good idea to write an update on it.

First: No, Aegisub is not dead. There is still at least a bit of life left. Version 2.1.9 is being prepared for release right now, and the main blocker for the Windows version right now is getting the user interface translations updated.

The old and present: VSFilter

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 23:06:00 +0000

A short while ago, yet another fork of the VSFilter subtitle renderer has surfaced, introducing more extensions. Let it be clear immediately: Aegisub will not support any new extensions to the ASS subtitle format. We strongly urge you to not use any extensions, and as for why, please read on.

Let’s start with the history of the ASS subtitle format: In 2004, Gabest made the Guliverkli project open source under the GPL license. This corresponds to the version 2.23 of VSFilter, or VobSub as it was better known as then. By this time, the ASS format was essentially already in its final form, no real extensions ever came up then. That’s more than 5 years ago. Around 2006-2007, the Guliverkli project mostly died off, almost no more development happened. However, a few patches started to crop up. In 2008, we made a fork for Aegisub, and ended up applying those existing patches, fixing a bunch of bugs and, unfortunately, also adding some new features. Very soon the Guliverkli2 project is forked off the Guliverkli project, and includes patches for all parts of it. The Aegisub patches are ported to Guliverkli2. Some more development happens, the Aegisub fork is abandoned in favour of Guliverkli2. The MPC-HC (Media Player Classic Home Cinema) project pops up, as a second fork of Guliverkli. They import most all the Guliverkli2 patches too, as well as add many major new features to Media Player Classic. Now, a new, fourth fork of VSFilter appears, and it has several new extensions.

Aegisub 2.1.8 released

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 09:22:00 +0000

It finally happened. About 6 weeks later than planned. We have released Aegisub version 2.1.8.

Download it from www.aegisub.org

So what’s new? Not a whole lot, actually. The major news would be that we now have versions for Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix systems. Do note that especially the Mac version is unstable and has several known problems, we consider it alpha quality software.

For the Windows version, the major highlights are:

Linking to Aegisub

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 18:57:00 +0000

Okay, since Aegisub has had a lot of different websites and lots of different URLs throughout the years, I thought it’d be time to clear up things a bit.

These are the correct addresses to link to:

Aegisub project in general: www.aegisub.org
Downloading Aegisub: www.aegisub.org
Discussion forum: forum.aegisub.org
This blog: blog.aegisub.org
Developers’ site (trac): devel.aegisub.org
Mailing lists: lists.aegisub.org
SVN repository: svn.aegisub.org
User manual: docs.aegisub.net - only for 2.1.x versions

Two things happened last night: We set up a new, temporary website at www.aegisub.org, this site will be replaced with a more complete website at a later point. When that happens, the purpose of this blog will change back to the original one: A developer blog, not a general news site. Also, the old Mediawiki installation at malakith.net was deleted last night, and set up to redirect to the new website. Please do not make direct links to malakith.net addresses, they will become invalid at some point.

Getting ready for 2.1.8

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:58:00 +0000

It’s been a little over three months since we released 2.1.7 stable, and we are happy to announce that version 2.1.8 is getting closer every day.

After we released 2.1.7 we split Aegisub development into two main branches: The stable branch where we apply bugfixes for the last stable version, and the development trunk where we work on grand new features.

For all of you not using Windows we also have some good news. Aegisub 2.1.8 is well on the way to become the first version we can call stable on Linux, FreeBSD and other UNIX systems. There’s only a few build-system issues remaining to fix. (Unfortunately it isn’t as well for the Mac version, more on that later in this post.)

Aegisub 2.1.7 released

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 13:43:00 +0100

Finally!

It’s been almost a month since the 4 year anniversary and the promise of 2.1.7 “within a few days”, but lots of stuff happened, people were travelling and otherwise not reachable. But I dare say it’s not a bad thing, this version of Aegisub we are releasing now is certainly more polished than what we could have managed four weeks ago.

So far, this release is just for Windows. Use the Download button above to get the new version. Release notes and more on what to expect after the break.

Four years of Aegisub

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 17:05:00 +0100

Today it’s just about four years since Aegisub was first conceived.

It was on the 17th of June 2005 in a private channel on the ChatSociety IRC network. We were discussing the various problems with making advanced typesetting in ASS subtitles and how poor the tools generally were.

The original name was Visual SSA, and it was originally just intended to be a tool to assist in doing typesetting. Yes, the visual typesetting tools we only got implemented somewhat in the more recent versions was the original goal of the program. General-purpose subtitle editing wasn’t it.

Kumaji explained

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 02:59:00 +0000

Kumaji is an advanced subtitle rendering engine, in development.

At the time of writing this, Kumaji does not render any subtitles whatsoever and is in general in a very early stage.

There are several reasons I started the Kumaji project, I will try to cover them in this post.

The name

First what does “Kumaji” even mean? It’s derived from Japanese where it would be written クマジ. If you reverse that, you get ジマク, “jimaku” (字幕), which means subtitles. Also, Kumaji can be understood as 熊字, “bear” + “writing”, hence Kumaji has a bear for a mascot! (Lots of people have suggested using Pedobear, this is wrong, I don’t want to have that association.)

Bug tracker back!

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 06:51:00 +0000

Yep, we got the bug tracker back online!

Unfortunately, since we only had an old back-up, about 6 weeks of activity was lost. The URL is the same as before and should work everywhere already.

Don't use \fad on fades to black

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 01:01:00 +0000

Dear typesetters,

I have seen this countless times. Every time, it has bothered me. Please, don’t do it anymore.

When the screen fades to black (or white, or any other solid colour, for that matter), DON’T use the \fad tag to fade the text along with it. When you use \fad, you’re making the text translucent, and not darker. The result is that it will blend with the background - including all the usual associated bugs if you have borders and shadows - and get somewhat darker because the background itself is getting darker - it just won’t get as dark as it SHOULD be, and the visual effect is that the text is getting brighter, relative to the background.

If programming languages were religions: the aftermath

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 03:37:00 +0000

Until December 15 2008, aegisub.net would typically get ~350 hits per day. Between December 16 and 19, it got a total of 266 thousand hits, thanks to the “If programming languages were religions…” post. So, first of all: Thanks, everybody! All feedback, positive and negative, was greatly appreciated.

First it was put on Digg. Then on reddit. Then, to my great surprise, on Slashdot… and on slashdot.jp. Stumbleupon. And even on one of my favourite blogs, Pharyngula. It was linked on many IRC channels and blogs around the Internet… Several of my friends wrote to tell me that they had seen it linked in some internal forum or mail list. I never expected this kind of reaction!

If programming languages were religions...

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:52:00 +0000

And now, for some off-topic:

“If programming languages were religions” (Inspired by “If programming languages were cars”)

C would be Judaism - it’s old and restrictive, but most of the world is familiar with its laws and respects them. The catch is, you can’t convert into it - you’re either into it from the start, or you will think that it’s insanity. Also, when things go wrong, many people are willing to blame the problems of the world on it.

Font hinting and you

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 19:54:00 +0000

… or why you should not use animation on the \fs override tag.

Do you know what font hinting is? If you haven’t worked with digital typography you might not, but it’s a technique used by (almost) all font rendering systems to make vector fonts (such as True Type, Open Type and Adobe Type 1) appear better on low-resolution mediums like computer monitors. (Actually CRT TV screens are even worse.)

Aegisub 2.1.6 released

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 02:31:00 +0000

Ooooooooops.

Apparently the fix on 2.1.5 caused audio selection to become much slower. This release will hopefully fix all of those issues. Since this is a very minor change, you can download a RAR with only the new executable (plus its pdb) and extract it over the 2.1.5 install (typically “C:\Program Files\Aegisub”). The RAR “patch” is available here. [Exias’ mirror]

If you want to download the complete 2.1.6 installer, you can download it here. [Exias’ mirror]

Mac progress...?

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:41:00 +0000

We get asked “what about the mac version?” once in a while and yes, it’s the eternal problem.

Aegisub can build on Mac and it can run, but unfortunately it’s quite hard to make it useful, not to mention the numerous GUI bugs and glitches.

Tonight I managed to make my first running build of Aegisub for PPC (G4/G5) architecture which was (of course) the first thing people started screaming for when I put out my first Intel builds some time last year!

Aegisub 2.1.5 released

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 02:44:00 +0000

Due to a fairly serious bug introduced in 2.1.4, here’s 2.1.5. Everyone is advised to update to it.

Fixed a bug in audio display that caused it not to update properly (introduced on 2.1.4)
Fixed a bug that caused Aegisub to crash if you attempted to load any ASS subtitles with malformed embedded fonts
Tweaked the layout of the visual typesetting bar

The win32 binary is available here.

BTW, a good way to keep up with Aegisub updates it to subscribe to the Atom feed - I recommend Google Reader.

Aegisub 2.1.4 Released

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 01:46:00 +0000

Version 2.1.4 is now out for Windows. The highlights are:

Hopefully removed the dependency on Visual C++ 2005 SP1 runtimes
Greatly improved the draw speed of audio display (should make committing on spectrum mode much faster, depending on your settings) - please let me know if any instabilities are caused by this
Fixed the aspect ratio of video when the audio display is too tall
Added Hungarian translation
Fixed a styling glitch in the fonts collector and translation assistant
Made Aegisub capable of running if ffms2.dll isn’t found

It can be downloaded HERE.

Three things that Java could learn from C++

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 16:03:00 +0000

This is a mostly off-topic rant that is being posted because I know that a good portion of our user base is composed of programmers.

Ever since I started working with Java, a few months ago, there have been many things that I have felt SHOULD be there, but aren’t. Three, in particular, have always bothered me: stack building, operator overloading, and const-correctness. For the rest of this post, I will write snippets in both C++ and in Java to illustrate the differences.

Bug tracker lost...

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 20:50:00 +0000

Oops.

We lost the bug tracker, and the latest back-up of it is from 2008-09-17. The chances to restore any newer dataset are very slim.

The server the tracker was hosted on has been shut down, and we don’t have a replacement yet. We’re trying to find a solution for the hosting.

Until later notice, expect bugs.aegisub.net to time out.

Aegisub 2.1.3a Released

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 01:54:00 +0000

Yes, it took a while, but here’s a new release preview build. The biggest changes from 2.1.2 are:

FFmpegSource2 is the new default audio and video provider, replacing Avisynth. This should provide frame-exact seeking (with keyframe support) on AVI, MKV and MP4 files, as well as other benefits. This is still a bit experimental, however. If you have any issues, just switch back to Avisynth in options.
~~The DirectSound audio player was reverted to what it was in 2.1.1, since 2.1.2 seems to have critical issues related to it.~~ [Edit: jfs says that the issue was after 2.1.2]
Many small issues around the program were fixed.
VSFilter has been updated to the MPC-HC 2.39 version, which includes jfs’s new patches (see this post)
Aegisub is now built against Visual C++ 2008 SP1 runtimes. Hopefully there will be no issues related to this (ASSDraw is still built against 2005 SP1 runtimes, due to library issues). If you can’t run Aegisub, try installing this and reporting how it goes.

A listing of other fixes can be found on TheFluff’s builds page. This release includes the Brazilian Portuguese (100%), Catalan (99%) and Spanish (99%) translations. All other translations are too outdated, and were left out. If you are willing to update any of them, please let us know.

Two Firefox extensions that you'll want

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 04:19:00 +0100

If you do any sort of Japanese reading on the Internet, you’ll want these two Firefox extensions:

XHTML Ruby Support Furigana Injector

The first one adds proper ruby (a.k.a. furigana, in the case of Japanese) support to Firefox. The second one is more interesting: it adds furigana to kanji on websites that don’t have it, making it much easier to read Japanese text.

An interesting side-effect of having proper ruby support in Firefox is that the times in blogger look quite odd, with the full date above them.

Unicode, UTF-8, UTF-16, UCS-2 - In a Nutshell

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:57:00 +0100

I have noticed that lots of people have no idea what exactly is the whole “Unicode”, “UTF-8”, “UTF-16” and “UCS-2” stuff, aside from the fact that it’s somehow related to the display of foreign characters. The objective of this post is to briefly explain them and dispel some of the myths associated with them.

Unicode is a coding system used to represent characters from many languages (including Japanese and Chinese) without the need to change your language locale. If you’ve tried writing Kanji in Medusa, you know what I’m talking about. In Unicode, characters are given an unique number. For example, the capital letter “A” is U+0041 (65 in decimal), and the Hiragana “ふ” is U+3075 (12405 in decimal). Characters are divided into planes of 65536 characters for convenience. Almost all common characters are in plane 0 (also known as the Basic Multilingual Plane, or BMP), which goes from code points U+0000 to U+FFFF. All kanji are in planes 0 and 2.

Kanamemo on Linux

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 03:04:00 +0100

Tomman has figured out how to build Kanamemo on Linux… So, in case you’re interested:

http://tomman.monkeeh.com/temp/linux_build_instruc.txt

Kanjimemo brainstorming and input request

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:48:00 +0100

漢字メモ？

[Text above added to try to attract some attention to this post]

Ever since I’ve posted about Kanamemo, there have been quite a few requests for a “Kanjimemo”, a tool based on the same idea, but for Kanji.

Even before, I had considered writing something like that… But I never started because I couldn’t quite figure out all the details on how it’d work. On this post, I’ll talk about some of the ideas that I had for it. If you’re interested in a “Kanjimemo”, please leave your feedback and suggestions in the comments!

Undocumented control

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 17:27:00 +0100

First, let me apologise for the bad pun in the title up front.

There are a few undocumented/“secret” functions in Aegisub that can be activated by holding the Ctrl key (Command on Mac) while clicking on things. These aren’t easter-eggs, just little things you may or may not need at times.

First thing is “play video without ensuring audio synchronisation”. This is mainly a debugging function. If you hold the Ctrl key while clicking a Play Video button, a flag is set such that, during that playback, Aegisub doesn’t attempt to keep the audio synchronised with the video by regularly seeking the audio if it gets too far away from the actual displayed video frame. This may be useful if you have a slow system that can’t handle decoding and displaying some complex video in real-time.

Subtitles on Youtube?

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:34:00 +0100

Recently Youtube got a new features: Subtitles and captions. You can upload a subtitle file to your own videos, so the viewers can get subs. Softsubs, that is. And you can add as many as you want.

So what format are those subtitles in? “Anything that reminds of SRT and SUB goes.”

So: Yes, Aegisub supports Youtube subtitles. Just export to SRT when you are done.

Remember that while Aegisub doesn’t show SRT (and other formats) as an option in the regular Save As dialogue box, you can still save directly to those formats. Just add the appropriate file extension yourself to the filename, and Aegisub will pick the right format automagically. You can also just pick regular “Save” if the filename (as displayed in the window title bar) already ends with eg. .srt.

Aegisub for Windows Me and 98? Never.

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 01:39:00 +0100

You may wonder why there is no version of Aegisub that works on Windows 95, 98, 98 SE or Me, together knows as Windows 9x. The reason is part technical-practical and part ideological.

The ideological part is short and simple: All of those operating systems are outdated, no longer under support by Microsoft and in general regarded as far inferior to the Windows NT line of systems (2000, XP, Vista). We would rather see people stop using outdated technology.

TrayDict: EDICT on your systray

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:29:00 +0100

A while ago, I posted about Kanamemo, a tool that I made to help me learn Hiragana and Katakana. Another tool that I’ve made to help me in the learning of the Japanese language was TrayDict:

TrayDict is a very simple application that sits on your systray until you bring it up with WinKey+Z. Then it lets you type a word in Kanji, Kana, Rōmaji or English, and it will search for it in EDICT (or any of the other supported dictionaries), returning every match, ordered by relevance. The catch is: it’s a complete hack. I made it in just a few days, without worrying at all about how well it’d work - I just wanted a tool for personal use. Even though I’m posting the link to it here, here are some things that you’ll have to keep in mind:

SVN server moved

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 17:53:00 +0100

Some time ago our SVN server (source code management) stopped working. We aren’t sure what went wrong, and since we haven’t been able to reach the administrator of it we’ve had to move the repository to a new server.

Fortunately we have had access to full repository backups, so no data is lost. However we have had to re-create the user database, so if you had commit access before but don’t have it now, please contact one of the project administrators.

Aegisub crack + keygen

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:48:00 +0100

Damn, it seems people started pirating Aegisub.

Though I wonder where the keys generated by that keygen should be entered… and what would they crack? And I’d love to know how they managed to compress Aegisub that much, it could really help our own distribution!

SPOILER: The site is probably fake, just making up torrents that don’t exist, so I’ll assume those numbers are fake too. The site also just links to a different website whose URLs look like they’d want you to sign up just to perform a search of their archive.

The epic of Aegisub-tan

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 17:47:00 +0100

A while ago, jfs and I thought that it would be interesting to have a mascot for Aegisub, similar to the OS-tans from Futaba. She would be a chibi-style mascot, wearing light plate armor and holding a staff, and she would be seen in places like the splash screen, or in “loading” and “Aegisub crashed” dialogs, with different expressions to show her “mood” (e.g. crying when Aegisub crashes).

So we tried to contact several different artists, and many of them seemed to be quite interested in drawing at least a concept for her - but all of them eventually gave up. Is there any hope for an Aegisub-tan?

How VSFilter renders border and shadow

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 03:00:00 +0100

If you’ve ever used the \be or the new \blur tag you might wonder, why do they blur edges and not everything?

The answer lies in how VSFilter internally handles fill, border and shadow, and the relationship between them.

The basic component of a subtitle rendering is the fill. The fill is the main shape of the text, ie. what you see if you disable border and shadow. (When I write “text” here it can just as well be a vector drawing made with \p1.)

VSFilter hacks

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:00:00 +0100

There’s lots of versions of Gabest’s VSFilter subtitle renderer around, some people are even still using versions that are several years old and are missing features and bugfixes. There’s cases of people still distributing these old versions around, sometimes as part of a package with other software such as VirtualDub.

Now it happens that some time in 2006, Gabest seems to have lost interest in working on VSFilter, so nothing has happened from his side, not even bugfixes. Fortunately VSFilter is open source, so we have picked it up and made a fork. We have included both some existing bugfixes and improvements that existed as patches, and also made our own bugfixes and further improvements.

Kanamemo: a tool for the apprentice weeaboo

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 03:24:00 +0100

Back in 2006, when I decided to learn Hiragana and Katakana, I looked around for flashcard programs to help me in my task. After finding that none of them actually worked as I thought that they SHOULD, I decided to roll my own. The result is Kanamemo:

It works by teaching you Hiragana and/or Katakana (at your choice) by “levels”. Each level typically contains 5 different kana. It basically shows you a kana and asks you to enter its Hepburn roomaji transliteration. If you get it right, you get +1 point in it. If you get it wrong, you get -10 to it AND -10 to the one that you confused it with. Once all kana of a given level are at least at level 5 (or so, I don’t remember the exact rules), you’ve learned them and it unlocks the next level.

Five cool things in Aegisub that people aren't aware of

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 03:25:00 +0100

One thing that I’ve noticed while talking to users of Aegisub is that there are a number of features that people just don’t realize Aegisub has. Here are five of them:

(Note: these tips apply to version 2.1.2.)

Loading audio from a video file If you have a video raw that you’re working on, and you’re just going to be performing audio timing on it, you don’t need to demux the audio from it. Provided that the video is in a format that Aegisub can work with (that is: most files on Windows), you can just go to Audio->Open File and pick the VIDEO file as the audio file to open (you will need to change the open dialog’s default filter to show those files). Note that this is different from “Open Audio From Video”, that just loads the audio from the currently open video file.

Universal Subtitle Format: a post-mortem?

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:36:00 +0100

The Universal Subtitle Format (USF) was an ambitious project. It was a XML-based subtitle format, supposed to replace the old and problematic community standard, Advanced Substation Alpha (ASS). It was chosen as the default subtitle format for the Matroska multimedia container, and was the primary format of Medusa’s unfortunate successor, ChronoSub.

It failed to achieve that goal.

This is what its page on CoreForge has to say:

The format is based on XML for many reasons: flexibility, human readability, portability, Unicode support, hierarchical system and easier management.

Random code-snippets from VSFilter

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:23:00 +0100

I’ve been reading and hacking on the VSFilter code more than is probably healthy, and have over the time found a lot of funny/strange clips of code.

For example, this line in GFN.cpp (Get File Name):

CString filename = title + \_T(".nooneexpectsthespanishinquisition");

In VSFilter.cpp you can find this gem:

/*removeme*/
JajDeGonoszVagyok();

Do you know the “opaque box” background style supported? As an alternative to wide outlines? Well here’s how it’s created:

So, what happened to the competition?

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 02:35:00 +0100

On July 9 2006, the last actively maintained ASS-Based General-Purpose Subtitling Software (henceforth ABGPSS) competition that Aegisub had - Sabbu - was dropped by its creator, kryptolus. Sabbu was an important program in the sense that it was the first ABGPSS to support Unicode and to be cross-platform. With Medusa and SubStation Alpha long dead, Subtitles Workshop being far from usable for anime fansubbing purposes, and SSATool designed for very specific purposes, Aegisub obtained monopoly on the ABGPSS business.

Why rendering \k and \kf effects is fast in VSFilter

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 22:23:00 +0100

This is a repost of something I wrote earlier on the AnimeSuki forums, in relation to a discussion of how much CPU time various kinds of karaoke effects take to render.

This discussion only covers TextSub (VSFilter), I don’t know what other renderers do and their use is still very limited. Also, everything that goes for \k also goes for \kf, \K and \ko. They use the same rendering technique. This will also explain a funny “artifact” some karaokers might have seen when using \kf with vertical karaoke.

The future of Aegisub

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:12:00 +0100

Greetings to all readers, and welcome to our new blog!

I’m Rodrigo Monteiro (a.k.a. amz) and I’ve founded the Aegisub project together with Niels Hansen (jfs). Although I’ve written a good portion of all the code, lately real life has decided to get in my way and I haven’t been contributing much - which is part of the reason why development has been slow.

But, to get to the point, this is what we’re planning for the future of Aegisub:

Aegisub development blog now open

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 16:25:00 +0100

This is a bit of an experiment, something we (at the Aegisub team) have talked about a few times: A development blog. The idea behind this blog is simply to have somewhere to post longer texts about Aegisub development and subtitling/video/technology in general.

I hope it’ll become a success, but let’s see :)