Jfs on Aegisub

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.

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.)

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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 :)