libass, asa, and the plans to fix VLC subtitle support...
 

Can someone explain to me how such projects will affect fansubbing, if at all?

People will have one more reason to use softsubs.

Uh, maybe it will finally convince more people to use softsubs. I doubt it though, because hurf durf our intellectual property!!!!111

Won't full ASS support in VLC essentially make CCCP obsolete in most circumstances?

No, because VLC is still a buggy piece of crap with the most ugly, user-unfriendly interface ever. It also only works with itself and not with any other applications, like CCCP does.
MPlayer could be close if it had a better GUI, but it suffers from the same problem as VLC does: not working with any other Directshow/VfW apps.

So, is asa gonna be the successor to ass?

what

asa is a renderer, not a subtitle format

So, then it's the successor to VSFilter...

Yes, asa and libass are both potential successors to VSFilter.

Can I have your babies?

I say pretty much exactly this to people who preach about VLC, then whinge about not being able to watch various anime releases and say that the subbers suck for using <insert whatever container/format here> when it's their fault for using the pos that is VLC.

I don't care if VLC is 'fixed' -- I won't use it on general principle that it's sucked for so long, and it's taken them so long to get around to addressing an, IMO, major issue.

The 'death' of CCCP isn't coming any time soon. I'd much rather have it and a media player of choice (I like MPC.) than having to use VLC's ugliness.

Tread carefully friend, you'd best not be calling me a VLC defender. I've been in CCCP camp for over a year now.

If ASA ever does get off its feet with full SSA/ASS support, and if AMZ has his way, you'll see newer possibly better subtitle formats emerge. That is so long as we can chain equinox to the coding table n_n. AS5 and all the madness associated with it can only come from the mind of a hoser that plays too much Starcraft.

Active projects in development equals lots of new possibilities at least. Don't ever think new projects won't effect what we're doing, its how we got where we are now.

*deleted tasteless remark*

He was joking about the 'hoser' thing. ;)

more like how Nicholi refers to just about anyone... in an endearing kind of way.

I'm not calling you anything. I just dislike the VLC fans. I didn't say you were one. (Being in the fansubbing scene, how could you be? No self respecting fansubber could recommend VLC.)

I'm not a fansubber, but what's so bad about VLC? Ok, so it's self contained. Its library versions are old, and it's an ass to compile. Softsub support sucks (until 0.9.0) and it's not pretty. But it works, and the interface is *normal*. What's so bad about VLC?

Uh, everything?

• list of known bugs longer than the collected works of William Shakespeare
• list of UNknown bugs that if printed out would be roughly equivalent in text mass to the entire US legislation
• extremely confusing, inconsistent and just plain buggy interface. (For maximum lols, try running it with your locale set to English and the default language for non-unicode applications set to Japanese - the result will be about 1/3rd of all strings being in the locale language, 1/3rd in English, and 1/3rd COMPLETELY BLANK.) If you don't agree with "confusing", try something like figuring out how something deceptively simple sounding like the playlist feature works with, say, streaming. If you succeed, please tell me, because last time I tried I was completely unable to make sense of it at all.
• has lots of potentially "useful" interfaces, such as Telnet, HTTP and God knows what else, all of which are even more confusing, obfuscated and inconsistent than the GUI, if that is possible (Try to program a scheduled showing of more than one file using the Telnet interface sometime. I dare you. Or try the web interface, it's not for the faint of heart.)
• completely and totally fails at what it originally was designed for, namely streaming video. Try streaming an MKV sometime. (spoiler: it doesn't work unless you reencode it on the fly, and possibly not even then)
• above-mentioned subtitle support (see quote below)

Well. I could make the list longer, but the point is, I'd be in favor of scrapping the entire VLC project and redo it from scratch, because it's pretty clear at this point that it's far, far beyond rescuing.

Not that I want to stick up for VLC or anything (god forbid!) but I'd like to see the survey that confirms this factoid :D

From a purely literary point-of-view, you understand ;)

Zoh my yes. I've never compiled VLC but reading the list of libs one would need...my mind shudders. I mean, I've built mplayer with at least 20 odd additional libraries but those are actually optional and you can build mplayer without them straight from svn. VLC is just frightening. I wish someone would make a script or something to do it all in one go.

Yes and I somehow lost the true meaning of hoser many years ago. Now its something else altogether, bwahahahaha.