Hi All,

the USF and matroska dev teams are proud to annouce, that finally the first alpha testing of tools to create, mux and play USF subtitles in/from MKV files are now being made available to the public. We encourage you to give it a shot, but also clearly give advice to not consider using these tools for final backups of your movies yet, as some minor things may still have to be changed with respect to how USF subs are best being stored in MKV files.

Here is what you need :

USF Editors :

ChronoSub
U96

Both are in pretty much alpha state still, but you will be surprised about the current status of support for SRT/SSA conversion into USF, as well as creating subs with advanced USF features already.


Muxers :

mkvmerge ( pre-release )

Currently only mmg/mkvmerge support muxing of USF subs, but AMG will hopefully soon offer it also.


Playback :

PixiShow
Haali Splitter

Based on unmei's pixifier, the first and only lib for USF rendering ( written in Delphi ), kaiousama created this great USF rendering DShow filter. Expect still a number of bugs in it, but its working pretty stable already on some machines here and no major issues have been reported with it from the dev team testing it.

Note that USF playback will only work correctly on DirectShow based players when both PixiShow and Haali's latest matroska splitter are being present on your system.

and now ....... Happy Testing !!!

Pardon my ignorance in video encoding, but what is USF format? What are the benefits of using it instead of other formats (as .srt)?

USF is more comparable to SSA/ASS than to SRT.
Like SSA it supports styles and inline styling ("markup") to change the appearance of subtitles as well as karaoke. USF is xml and unicode based. It also supports a couple of more special stuff (images, effects, ..) but these are not yet to be considered stable.

USF = Universal Subtitles Format

A modern, XML based subs format, similar powerful than SSA but much easier to create/edit. One of the huge advantages we see is clearly also the existence of a rendering lib that can be used x-platform, even if Delphi may not be the dream of the C maniacs working on LInux players like mplayer or Xine . SSA is mainly only supported on Windows correctly in Gabest's DVobSub, most Linux players can only render the main text in the subs, but not the effects. USF will make a big difference here.

Another thing to keep in mind is, that many hardware standalone units today do have XML libraries supported in their firmwares ( ask the KiSS software lead developer, Stefan Hallas Andersen, about this ), so it will be MUCH easier to support USF on standalones than SSA ! Also, USF has true specs, while SSA has a kind of that only .....

Christian
matroska project admin
http://www.matroska.org

OK, thanks for the clear explanation. I rarely encode DVD, but the next time, I'll think about using USF format for subtitle

Noooooooo ! Not yet ! Let's first make sure its all fully stable and usable ....

Christian

The real question is: who does REALLY need all that stuff in subtitles. I don't know about others, but I don't need my subtitles in rainbow colors bouncing on the screen...

Next time I'll encode a DVD, USF will probably fully stable and v.2 certainly in beta stage

Seriously, don't worry: I've understand that USF in matroska is still beta. I've no problem yet with current subtitle format (I can't even remember the format I'm using)

Much more useful that mad formatting, IMO (I think that the only justifiable subtitle formatting is italics, and still barely justifiable), would be screen positioning of text. Say, you want to put the translation of a diary headline next to it, and said headline appearing at the top of the screen. Can USF do that?

Yes it can. You can place your subtitle aligned to video or screen borders or freely place the subtitle in the video window, rotate it if the text you want to translate is not horizzontally placed, and make it perform custom animation effects.

This is a bit off topic, but I noticed that Haali media splitter doesn't recognise .m4a extension but does .mp4. Would it be possible to fix?