Vobsub idx file......can you edit contents to change font colour?

[lostboys]

I'm pretty certain you can't do this, but am asking in case I'm wrong.

I have some old files that seem to have .sub and .idx files that provide the subtitles.

Problem is the subtitles are a white character outline with a mid/light grey inner, thus making them particularly difficult to read on screen.

I wondered if it was possible to change the colour of the subtitles (I do realise the subs are a graphic stream in the .sub file) via some editing of the palette info in the .idx file, but vobsub seems to have dropped out of favour some time back so getting recent info is proving a little difficult.

To compound the problem I run 'nix only, thus don't really want to install Windows based apps as in my experience that has often led to a rabbit hole of something like "....oh, I know you've installed the windows app, but you now have to edit these 27 files while playing a game of Twister...", OK I exaggerate, but I'm just not going down a windows solution route, if I can't fix these easily I'll try to track down subs in a .srt file or similar.

Help me obiwans.....you're my only hope......

[Moralez]

Yes you can. I used to do it all the time. I haven't done it since I've been using Subtitle Edit. The IDX file produced by SE seems to look a bit different than what I remember but I'm sure it's just the layout. As I recall I used to change (copy & paste) the palette colors. I don't recall ever changing the custom colors. I like a light yellow as the font color so in my example below that would be ffff97. ffffff is white and 000000 is black. You'll have to experiment what each position refers to unless someone with more knowledge chimes in.

# The original palette of the DVD
palette: 000000, ffff97, 000000, 000000, 828282, 828282, 828282, ffffff, 828282, bababa, 828282, 828282, 828282, 828282, 828282, 828282

# Custom colors (transp idxs and the four colors)
custom colors: OFF, tridx: 0000, colors: 000000, 000000, 000000, 000000

[lostboys]

Thanks for the response, it's one of your older posts that I saw that drew my attention to the possibility, however as you use Subtitle Edit which is a Windows app that route isn't open to me by choice.

Do you happen to remember which of the variables you might have changed in the .idx file, I'm asking as it'll be quite time consuming to do this through trial and error of that many variables.

[Moralez]

I've looked for documentation on my system hoping to find what I did back then but no luck. As I mentioned I like a light yellow (ffff97) for my font color. So apparently font color is set with the second set of HEX characters. However, I have some old IDX examples where the third set of characters is set to ffff99, which was what I used back in the day. Sorry, not much help I know. You should also search Doom9 for solutions. I use a black boarder so any 000000 could be the boarder.

[lostboys]

To anyone else coming to this later......

In my instance in seems to be the third set of hex values in the

# The original palette of the DVD
palette: 000000, ffff97, 000000, 000000, 828282, 828282, 828282, ffffff, 828282, bababa, 828282, 828282, 828282, 828282, 828282, 828282

dataset.......

So thanks to Moralez for the pointer.

[Moralez]

Glad to hear you solved your problem. So the second set of HEX values is the font color and the third set of HEX values is the font boarder. I wonder why there are 16 values?