How to get better-looking subtitles

From smplayer

MPlayer 1.0rc1 includes a library (libass) which allows proper rendering of SSA/ASS subtitles. But it can also be used for other subtitles, like srt or sub files. In SMPlayer this is enabled by checking the option "Use SSA/ASS library for subtitle rendering" in Preferences->Subtitles.

Until now it allowed you to change the text and border color of the subtitles. Now you can further customize the look of the subtitles.

MPlayer allows to override the SSA/ASS styles. Incidentally this can be used to improve the look of srt/sub subtitles. In SMPlayer 0.4.24 there's a line edit in the subtitles section of the preferences dialog to change SSA/ASS styles.

Of course, a srt or sub subtitle is not a SSA/ASS subtitle, but it seems that MPlayer internally converts the subtitle to SSA/ASS format.

To compare, some screenshots:

These are the traditional MPlayer subtitles (not using the ass library):

Using the ass library:

Now you can get something like this:

This has been achieved with this line:
Bold=1,Outline=2,Shadow=4,FontName=Arial,Fontsize=28

You can get info about SSA/ASS style options in this document (chapter 5).

But... as you has probably guessed this option also override styles in real SSA/ASS subtitle files. It's not recommended to do that, as the result may be worse.

So my suggestion: if you use a lot of SSA/ASS subtitles it would be better to leave the "style" field empty. On the other hand if you mainly use srt or sub subtitles you may safely experiment with this option to get better-looking subtitles.