evad.zone

We all know N900’s outstanding multimedia capabilities, right? Built-in media player can chew full-blown divx movies without hesitation. However, it doesn’t support subtitles useful to foreign-language-impaired people. Fear not, solution is there.

All you need is install kmplayer and mplayer packages for extras-testing. Widely recognized mplayer is ultimate media player for Linux with built-in support for subtitles in plain txt format. Kmplayer is just a front-end for mplayer – quite rough, to be honest – but since we’re planning to watch movies, not an UI of a player, it should not be an issue.

Having both applications installed basically concludes this solution. Playing any divx file with associated subtitles file (ie. FancyMovie.avi & FancyMovie.txt both in same directory) should make subs appear automagically.

Troubleshooting

Making sure kmplayer uses correct backend player
Open up kmplayer’s options menu, get into ‘Select Player’ option and make sure mplayer is chosen there.

National characters not appearing in subs correctly
A little X-Terminal trickery is required here, not much tough. You need to know encoding of subtitle file, for example most of Polish subtitles are encoded with windows/cp-1250. That needs to be added to mplayer’s config file located at /home/user/.mplayer/config in following manner:

subfont-encoding=windows-1250

or perhaps using a single command in X-Terminal:

echo "subfont-encoding=windows-1250" >> /home/user/.mplayer/config

Now go and enjoy subtitle-powered movies on your shiny N900. :)

Tags: Maemo, mplayer, n900, nokia, subtitles, tutorial

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at 20:30 and is filed under Maemo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.