Baka Sub News
News
This page is mainly of historical interest.
Aug 27, 1999
I just posted a new version to the download section. Enjoy! Please check the CHANGELOG file for a list of things that have changed. The major changes to look out for are dynamic linking with the latest stable libraries (libstdc++, libgtkmm, etc), plug-in support, and a multi-threaded bttv_ttf. I can't provide a statically linked binary for now because my libs are screwed up for GCC 2.95. I'll try to post one tomorrow though.
Aug 18, 1999
A much-needed site redesign was done real quick-like tonight. I've been working with the PHP system for a while at work and I've found it to be an indispensible web tool.. don't leave home without it 
. You won't notice much of a change from the client point of view but trust me, it's MUCH easier to do updates now and will get easier.
Tonight I have also posted the first pass at a plug-in spec in the new documentation section. I'm kind of excited about the things this will let me do once it's done. It should be a nice, fairly clean interface once I work out some potholes (like the referencing of internal structures defined inside BakaSub). Using this system and an appropriate set of plug-ins, along with XFree 4.0, I could easily forsee a time when you've got: a normal PC monitor with BakaSub loaded, looking at and editing a JacoSub script; an LD player with a cable attached for frame control, and LD you're subbing loaded up; a secondary display with video-out showing the preview; and real-time display of the output. Put 2 and 2 together, and what you've got there is _real time_ subtitling. You'd be able to skip around in the LD and have BakaSub automatically plop up the proper subtitles for preview and see it on the monitor. *spooge* =)
Jun 10, 1999
Well, it's been a really long time I suppose.. that tends to happen when you go broke ^_^;; -- but I'm going to go ahead and put up a new test version for people who don't want to get the code out of CVS to bang on. If you want to get the latest source code (since the GPL says you HAVE to be able to =) then get it out of CVS. I'm not packaging it up for now. I will on the next release, though -- the next release is going to be a big one.
Mar 23, 1999
I almost have a 0.1.11 to put up (just a few irritating bug fixes, mainly) but for now I am just going to post.. drum roll please.. the static binary!! I finally got the stupid static compilation to work. It took working around a bug in egcs (I can't believe it still has so many obvious bugs!!!) and compiling for several hours to get the libs I needed, but there it is. Anyone with support for ELF Linux binaries should now be able to run it.
Mar 21, 1999
I have dumped all old news into news-old.html, which you can access by the link at the top of the page. I am also releasing the first version of the C++ version of BakaSub, which I am quite happy about. There are some bugs still and it's not usable for real work yet but it has a very solid foundation, as compared to BakaSub/Python. Check it out if you get a chance!
Mar 19, 1999
Someone get me away from this damned computer!! ^_^;; I've probably spent about 16-18 hours of the previous 48 frantically coding on BakaSub while I've got some free time (during spring break in school). I basically wanted to get past the major design phase so that I could just code bits of meat here and there instead of having to expend a lot of creative energy into the design pieces. The result is that over the past two days, the code size of BakaSub/C++ has just about doubled, maybe more. Pretty much everything that's going to be a major part of the editing UI (minus the timing facilities like time by WAV) is in here now in some form or other. The screen shot here shows a Hameln script. You can see that I've selected one (1) random row at the bottom, and it renders all the subtitles that would be active during that row onto the screen. Styles aren't really cared about right now, so all three titles are just treated as primary, secondary, and tertiary (in their respective colors). This is using the new three-tier compilation system and the abstracted rendering system (you know, the one that can be replaced at the drop of a hat for, say, a streamed movie file version) and that's almost ready. I am just almost ready to put up some code. Very soon now...
Mar 17, 1999
BakaSub/C++ (also known as BakaSub 0.1.10) is coming along quite nicely. I have setup almost all of the major abstraction classes and I'm about to start fleshing them out. Some of the UI itself is actually working already, as mentioned previously. Most things are designed around the standard "Document-View" paradigm that's prevalent in Windoze (change for TM).. well, even though Windoze is disgusting, they did a few things right. Technically the real guts of BakaSub could easily be extracted and a port made to a totally different GUI toolkit or OS (like Windoze). It is even feasable given the layout that this could be made to work with commercial titlers that don't even go through a genlock and a PC at all. More info coming soon, and an initial code offering will actually be posted, along with revamped web pages.
Mar 7, 1999
I have selected GTK-- as the toolkit for the C++ version of BakaSub that is currently in progress. Once I got a version that actually compiled and ran on my system, and I got GTK+ 1.2 installed, I began working in earnest on it. Work is progressing quite nicely now. The C++ version is already to the point where it brings up most of the main screen and loads an SSA script into the script dialog sheet.
I've been very impressed with GTK-- and I'll probably end up dropping the Python version at this point. It was basically an extended prototyping exercise and I'm working on The Real Goods now. =) This complete rewrite is going to include all of the things I've talked about in earlier news blurbs -- a highly abstracted renderer so that a seperate process (on the same machine or another) can handle the rendering process, full preview, etc. C++ will provide me with the raw horsepower and low-level access to do this _right_.
Feb 21, 1999
A new version of Bakasub was just posted. The main purpose is to put out a version with a preview of the new WYSIWYG subtitle display for people to play with, if you'd like to. Make sure you get the new bsub-pygtk package or use the pygtk.diff patch if you get this version.
Feb 20, 1999
I've decided to take some new UI directions from where I was headed originally, having gotten a few ideas on the matter. The biggest change in direction is that I am dumping the previous "what you see is sort of what you get" preview window for subtitles, and instituting the idea of a _complete_ and accurate preview. This means that you'll see a scale model of your output subtitle screen while editing, including all colliding or overlapping events. This isn't quite done yet, but here is a little preview to the right. Click on the image to expand it. The scale model is low quality and kind of slow right now, but I will do battle with GTK and Python for the pixels and write a nice antialiased version that's also fast =). Also on the agenda (and sort of related) is that I am planning very soon to break apart the rendering system into two seperate systems -- one for actually rendering subtitles, and another for displaying them. This lets the display routines concentrate on what they need to do, and how they need to do it for different output types. One type will be a preview display -- like what's used in the screen shot. This will also provide hooks for manipulating the titles in various ways, the most obvious of which is a right-click menu for changing the way they look. Another will be the chromakey display, which masks parts of the screen with a key color. Alpha blending will be handled by stippling on those. And of course, there will be a composite display which takes input frames and composites the images. Those will provide real alpha blending if that's desired.
Finally, the WAV timing is soon to come (as mentioned before). It's probably going to modify the editing controls on the upper left of the window in some way, though I'm still thinking of exactly how that will work.
Feb 13, 1999
Ugg. Almost been a whole month since I wrote any news at all. This is pretty bad. Gomen ne! ^_^; Anyway -- school started, I'm changing jobs, AND I redid my computer using Debian's Potato (bleeding edge like a mofo) distribution with Debian-JP patches. It's _really_ nice compared to the last Debian (2.0) and it's actually fairly easy to install. _TONIKAKU_, the good news is that I took BakaSub, complete with its pre-compiled PyGTK libraries, and it runs perfectly out of the box on new Debian too! This is good news! I didn't expect my pre-compiled binaries to work on other systems but apparently they do.
In the near future I am going to try to get in the beginnings of the timing by WAV interface, because it's _long past due_. I have some stuff that I really want to use it for so I'm going to scratch that itch :^).
I'm also planning pretty soon to start segregating the interface code from the rendering system, which will be rewritten in pure C. The Python code will likely remain the majority of the program, but a Python module, or maybe even a totally seperate process, will be what actually renders titles to the screen. This will bring a vast increase in my ability to precisely time the titles, and should speed things up enough to do special effects! (yeah!!) It will also bring the rendering closer to the hardware, where it belongs, so I can do special effects like trigger-on-sound and things moving around the screen. It may also give me a blizzard's chance in hell of getting the Video4Linux cards that don't do chromakey working.^_^;
The first version will almost surely be a Python module (possibly using threads), but setup on a message passing model to allow it to be put into a process that communicates through pipes or TCP (so you could have a seperate machine for doing your actual chromakeying... imagine the coolness that could bring you =). It will use the good 'ol GNU configure scripts so no fretting about porting it. More info to come soon...
Jan 17, 1999
BakaSub 0.1.6 on downloads page. It's basically a little cleanup pass that enables all the editing controls up top and a few other useful things (insert/delete script line). It also removes the color highlighting for now since it's not right. This should finish up all the neccessary functionality to do script editing. The next place I plan to head is timing by WAV file. Once I get that and timer ramping working Ok, I'll head back and put in more script editing type stuff.
Jan 14, 1999
New BakaSub 0.1.5 up on the downloads page. It's not quite all I wanted to get in but I got sick of working on it for now and instead I'd like to get this (more working) version out for people to play with if they want. I'm still not sure if there's anyone actually doing much playing on it =)
Jan 12, 1999
I got working a bit more today on the practical aspects of BakaSub. When the toolkit maintainers can't see fit to keep any version compatabilities, umm.. COPE =). I seperated out the goofy menu generation code that depended on GTK+ 1.0.x and created my own menu factory functions that are more generic. Now the beast (vaguely) works in GTK+ 1.0.x and 1.1.x. I won't be doing any more work on this right now though, because other than getting that worked around, it's the same ol' shite (half the things are broken, spewing 'deprecated' messages, etc). I'm more interested in getting a working subtitling program for now. But anyway, for those of you who are into this kind of thing, I have made screen shots of BakaSub running with Raster's Pixmap theme and then with his Metal theme. I don't know how anyone can get anything done with the Pixmap theme, but to your own tastes =). Metal looks quite nice though, and a little less bland than the default GTK theme. Maybe once I've gotten wav file timing/edit mode in place, I'll work on some Gnome support.
Jan 7, 1999
Sorry for the lack of updates lately. The news to report is that I've been working with the Video4Linux card I borrowed, and the results don't look very promising speed-wise, but they look really good quality-wise. If your computer can stand a full-stream 30fps video capture, overlay, and paste into a frame buffer, then you will be all set once I get the code done to handle that kind of card. As I mentioned, the quality is pretty incredible compared to something like an ATI All-in-Wonder -- the picture is very sharp, colors look good. The colors can also be adjusted on the average V4L tuner chip (bttv) and I have found that this could pretty easily compensate for the mild washing effect the ATI All-in-Wonder's output (ImpacTV) chip has. This mode also allows for things like alpha-channel overlay in software. My Celeron 333a with Mach64 chip, however, could only handle about 15fps (probably the output video card more than anything). On the other hand, the Bt848 chips have an overlay mode that dumps straight into the frame buffer and lets you "carve out" sections of the display using clipping rectangles. I may look into some funky solution to the speed problem using this technique. Anyway, more on this to come a bit later!
Dec 27, 1998
I finally got out another interim release. This winter break has been a lot busier than I had expected (mainly, trying to catch up at work, which is how I pay rent and stuff, so.. =). This release has at least one glaring bug that makes it useless for subtitling work (broken centering on smart line wrapping) but I figure someone might want to look at it. I have in a tentative notebook control for the Dialogue/Wave controls at the top, although there are no wave controls yet. I'd be interested to hear if someone has a better interface idea. I could use the 'switch' button like in SSA, but I think this is more elegant for GTK. There are a ton of little changes and fixes, but most of them are strategic positioning for the morph the program's code will make in the next few versions (more modular, using front ends, subtitle collision handling, etc).
Dec 15, 1998
Well, no release for a while still, but I'll give an update about what I've been working on anyway. I've got the timing during playback almost perfect. It may be perfect now, I haven't tested it since I made the last fixes. I watched an episode of Violinist of Hameln using BakaSub and it looks really kewl(tm).. =) I am also totally reorganizing and remaking the line balancing and display code. This will directly facilitate collision handling and multiple simuntaneous events (draw #1, draw #2, erase #1, erase #2, without erasing #2 on the "erase #1" =). I had written on my schedule to have WAV file loading done by tomorrow. Since I'm going broke and need to work as much as I can, it'll be a challenge. Let's see if I can do it :^)
Dec 10, 1998
My apologies for the silence on here and lack of udpates, I just finished two finals (and three out of four classes) for the semester. A lot more stuff will be coming in the near future. The news of note is that I have successfully compiled BakaSub using "freeze", a Python util that lets you make stand-alone Python programs that require no Python run-time environment. This is good news for people who don't have Python or don't have a relatively recent Python. It also will ensure that my pre-compiled PyGTK works with your BakaSub setup. Basically, you'll get a bakasub-1.0 executable, along with the PyGTK runtime (on the download page). These two self-contained packages, when put together, will let you run BakaSub with no extra goodies to download or install on almost any modern Linux system (libc6 required still). I may make snapshots of these available from time to time, but I still recommend using the source releases for a lot of reasons.. faster updates, and you can see what's going on if something breaks.
Dec 2, 1998
BakaSub 0.1.3 was released. This is entirely a maintenance release... it simply switches back to PyGTK 0.4.5 and Gtk+1.0.6, the standard "stable" versions. It also has support for a pre-compiled PyGTK package, which is provided on the download page. Please see the enclosed README of BakaSub for installation info. If you don't have PyGTK and want to play with BakaSub, but you do have Gtk+ and Python >=1.5 installed, then download both the bakasub and bsub-pygtk packages. It OUGHT to work... =) Also I am getting together a BakaSub mailing list. I don't have a majordomo thing setup for it yet, but I will be making a mail alias on some machine that will allow posting to the list. The content of the mailing list will be almost exclusively a copy of these news updates, but when they happen. If you are interested, please email me (see bottom of main page) and let me know.
Dec 1, 1998
Thanks to Andrew at UT, I have an Intel Bt848 Miro board to work with now! Thanks Andrew!! I'll be working on getting some video4linux support into this thing in the near future. It will probably end up using the full-rate frame grab mode, which is slower than a chromakey overlay, but the quality of the video is rather phenominal.
Dec 1, 1998
Version 0.1.2 posted. This has a fix for an SSA loading bug that truncated times in a weird way (iccky =). It also has a preliminary version of the playback mode so you can play with that if you want. Note that this is probably going to be the last version using Gtk+ 1.1.x for a while. I am going to revert to 1.0.x for the time being. This will make things a little less buggy, and it will let many of you use BakaSub who previously couldn't do it yet.
Nov 29, 1998
Finished up a preliminary document describing how to use the goofy ATI All-in-Wonder cards under Linux for subtitling / genlock. Yes, yes, you CAN do it. Sorry people. I know you wanted to have a nice rant about closed-driver vendors and all, but really... this is how it used to be done before they cared!! ^_^ Anyway, the paper is here.
Nov 28, 1998
I just posted BakaSub 0.1.1. I've adopted a versioning scheme similar to that of GTK+ and the Linux kernel. Odd numbered releases are considered development or unstable, and even numbered releases are "release quality". Each minor release will increase the last digit. This package was created automatically by my new packaging utility. If you have some trouble that looks like missing or corrupted files, please let me know. New for this version:
SSA scripts are now fully loaded and parsed, and all info is saved, except for script comments "!:"
Scripts can now be saved as SSA format, and all script info is saved properly. "BakaSub Fast" is officially relegated for development purposes ONLY. DO NOT USE IT TO SAVE YOUR WORK!! YOU'VE BEEN WARNED! =)
Support for font shadow effects is in (thanks for the tips Kotus!). As stated in the "intended to do" list, all effects are previewed in the preview window. Currently supported are drop-shadow(2) and border(1).
Slightly better color handling (doesn't truncate 8-bit RGB values)
There are still weird random notes and buggettes laying all over the place. If you find a bug please let me know. I know the menus are very broken, I think this is a PyGTK problem (or the way I'm using it). If a menu doesn't work, just keep trying. Additionally, I have corrected the LICENSE for this version. As such, 0.1a is not available anymore. Please don't sue me for using version 0.1a .
For those of you who can't run it yet, look here for a screen shot preview (not a whole lot to see...)
Nov 25, 1998
I've posted a URL to a "universal script convertor" (my quotes =). At some point I'll probably try to work with this program to get BakaSub to support random formats =). I'm away in Dallas right now though.. (sigh =) More news later.
Nov 23, 1998
Posted first early alpha test version. Download at your own peril!! ^_^
Nov 18, 1998
Well, I finally got ahold of a newer installation of Linux. I'm now running RedHat 5.2 with the Gnome 0.30.1 RPMs from the Gnome site, and the newest PyGTK and PyGNOME that my system can stand. Which means that Gnome support will be coming soon. This is also (along with school) why I haven't done much in the past week or so. Hopefully I can have a downloadable copy soon. I also updated the web site to have a nicer interface in expectation of the larger amount of info I will have online soon.
Nov 14, 1998
Site first posted.