I'm not certain where you mean when you refer to the Text Renderer and the Mac Text Renderer. I made the adjustments I described above in Preferences > Subtitles & OSD. If you want me to test in a different way, just let me know what you'd like done.

see attached screenshots.
so how are you changing the font effect?

Gotcha. The picture I've attached shows where I was making changes. I'll go have a look now to see what happens in the approach you just described.

Mac Text Renderer: Changing any of the three options in that preferences panel had the configured effect appear in a movie.

Text Renderer: No changes made here had any effect.

What else can I test?

so what exactly do you mean by font style? were you able to play with the effects provided by the font pallet (cmd+T)?

By font style I simply mean the font, like changing from Helvetica to Minion Pro. In my earlier message, when I first said I'd changed the font style, it was by using the basic subtitle preferences and clicking the Choose button. That brings up the standard font-selection panel, like you mentioned with Command-T.

In that panel, I'm not certain which effects you're referencing. Do you mean things like the color? I can only change the color using the options provided in the VLC pop-up menu.

so no, I mean the Font effect as seen in the third picture posted earlier. well I think we can wrap it up... thanks for the help and the intention. The main problem was the relative size of the font and that is solved thanks to VLC 1.0.5! I hope that the VLC team would pick up on this issue and correct it in future versions.

Yeah, like I said a couple messages ago, I couldn't get anything in that Text Renderer preferences panel to work. Since I can't get VLC to display for me the settings you'd like it to provide, I don't have a firm sense of what how you want subtitles to appear, but did you play with the Stroke and Shadow options in the Movist preferences to see if they can achieve (or come closer) to what you want?

what do you mean, I never saw such preferences. please teach me oh grand master :)

In Movist, open its Preferences with the standard Command-Comma. In the Subtitle section, simply pick your desired colors for Text, Stroke and Shadow, then adjust the sliders to see if any of them produce the look you want. You'll probably most want to play with the Width and Offset sliders, but you're of course welcome to try the others.

One of the nice aspects I'm seeing with Movist is that once you release the mouse from a slider position, the effect appears in the movie. So you may want to have a movie playing and the preferences window open beside it.

(Grand master? You're learning me here, too. I've never worked with subtitles prior to this thread.)

Oh, you mean in Movist... got it ;) and as I said, this app is superior in its subtitle rendering capabilities.
well, once again thanks for the support.

we're all learning here
 

OK, after you guys made me red-faced (well, pink, anyway) for not getting the .srt detail, I bought an Italian (not my native language) DVD, found .srt English subtitles for it, transcoded with Handbrake 0.9.5 adding the .srt, and found, as you detailed, that VLC 1.1.9 will let me choose the font from Preferences>Subtitles and OSD. I discovered and then read here that for the changes to take effect, the current VLC playback window must be closed then re-opened, and, voilà, there are my chartreuse Big Caslon subtitles.

QuickTime Player, which in some iterations of Mac OS X is less jerky, and some iterations more jerky, than VLC for playback of .mp4 files, offers no flexibility with subtitles other than on or off, and uses a fat white sans serif font I dislike as the default. One might attack it with PropertyList Editor, but I think I'll investigate Movist instead.

(It was a DVD I'd been seeking for years, not a special purchase to keep up with you guys.)

Wow, a DVD image file, burnable, with .srt subs that work
 

OK, thanks guys.

I like to keep backups of DVDs, especially expensive, hard to obtain ones, like this one from Italy. Why? Children have fingers, jam exists, dogs have teeth, and other reasons.


I found I could make a DVD image file with the .srt subs at root level, and that MPlayerX (from the Mac App Store) will play the image file. If one mounts the image file before pointing MplayerX at it to play it, one can then _ALSO_ point MplayerX at the .srt file in the mounted volume, and, voilà, one is playing, more or less, a DVD while showing .srt subtitles embedded at root of the DVD. These are esoterica, to be sure. I'm off to try it with a meatspace DVD-R.

That things be clear, this is not a discussion of eliminating copy protection. It is a discussion of how to make use of .srt subtitles burned onto backup DVD-Rs.

Hey thanks a lot of this tip....I've been messing around with aegisub because I also wanted to change the subtitle display in vlc and don't have the preference options that others seem to have and rather than changing versions of vlc...(which I really like by the way) I found your post and voila...easy as abc in Movist....Thanks alot.