I installed the Slackware 13.37 package MPlayer-1.0rc4-i686-3sl.txz along with all of the available codecs, etc. I also have freetype-2.4.4-i486-1.txz installed for font rendering.
For my first dvd encode, I extracted subtitles with
mencoder movie.vob -nosound -ovc frameno -o nul -sid 0 -vobsubout subtitle-en -vobsuboutindex 0 -vobsuboutid en
and then played the 1st pass encode of the movie with
mplayer movie.1 -vobsub subtitle-en
All was well except that the subtitles are shown in this thick, crude font that is virtually unreadable because all the loops in various letters (a e o etc) are completely filled in. I've tried different ways of playing the movie, e.g.
mplayer movie.1 -vobsub subtitle-en -ass-force-style FontName=DejaVuSerif,Default.Bold=1
mplayer movie.1 -vobsub subtitle-en -subfont /usr/share/fonts/TTF/DejaVuSerif.ttf
mplayer movie.1 -vobsub subtitle-en -font /usr/share/fonts/TTF/DejaVuSerif.ttf
and I've tried recreating the subtitle files with those same options
$mencoder movie.vob -nosound -ovc frameno -o nul -sid 0 -vobsubout subtitle-en -vobsuboutindex 0 -vobsuboutid en -subfont /usr/share/fonts/TTF/DejaVuSerif.ttf
mencoder movie.vob -nosound -ovc frameno -o nul -sid 0 -vobsubout subtitle-en -vobsuboutindex 0 -vobsuboutid en -ass-force-style FontName=DejaVuSerif,Default.Bold=1
but there is no change in the subtitle rendering.
How should I do this? Ideally I would like the subtitles to show as plain black text with a white border or background, so that the text doesn't get lost in movie scenes that are predominantly black or white.