[Feature Request] Multi-language subtitle support?

[regymm]

Hi, I'm trying to use this software but met some problems when playing .ASS subtitle files with multiple languages. Apologies if this has been asked before.

For example in this file, lines before 808 are a full Japanese subtitle of the caption, lines 809 to 1541 are Chinese translations, and the rest are furigana appearing on top of Japanese. A correct rendering should look like this. They seem to have their own timelines in the file.

However in Penguin either only Japanese is shown, or only furigana is shown. If I manually delete others and only leave one kind of language, it can show correctly. Showing furigana with precise position control may be very hard to implement, but being able to display two languages together would be really nice.

[carsonip]

@regymm Thanks for the feature request!

Very interesting. The subtitle file contains dialogues with overlapping timings to implement multi-language. This isn't something that I've seen before.

Do you think it is a common pattern for .ass files to support multi-language? I will be interested to add a feature to support this.

[regymm]

Thanks for your reply. I haven't used many subtitles yet so sorry that I'm not sure about whether this pattern is common.

Meanwhile, I found another kind of subtitle today:

It's multi-language but uses \N for two-line display instead of two separate timelines -- and thus works fine with Penguin.
So I think it would be quite easy to write a simple script to "merge" the timelines and add \N before using Penguin to play. In this case, no modification is needed on the player side. I think I can do the script in a few hours.

Support of complex furigana positioning like in the previous file would be hard(I think) but subtitles will be just fine without them.

[carsonip]

Your fix would work if the timings for different languages match. If they are not exactly the same, it will require a bigger change because Penguin wasn't designed with that in mind. But I would like Penguin to support that.

I assume positioning is harder and is not as important, unless someone proves me wrong.

[gheescoo]

I think if Penguin would support LaTeX(wat im saying lol) the furigana problem could be fixed. As for multi-language support, maybe you just need two Penguins, one playing zh- marked track, and another playing jp- marked

Subtitles from SweetSub are likely to have zh and jp the two languages