I noticed recently that mpv shows arabic/persian subtitles in a very buggy way.
the letters are disjoined (persian/arabic is like cursive english, its letters are connected to other letters in a word)
also some of letters are shown bigger than other but the whole subtitles is very small (had to use a bigger size font setting in mpv for it to be seen)

the english words are shown correctly.

It was not like this before.
I checked and it seems to be an issue when using noto-fonts .
when I removed noto-fonts (forced removed them as they are dependancies of a lot of GUI apps) then issue is gone as mpv seems to use the next font for it (vazirmatn). also using gnu-free-fonts instead of noto-fonts doesn't have this issue either.

vlc doesn't have this issue.

the noto-fonts had an update but downgrading to that version doesn't fix this issue.

also I think the issue is more than just mpv.
today I tried to use ffmpeg to burn a subtitle in a video.
I got the same issue with default font used when noto is used. (subtitle is shown wrong just like mpv)

and I get this in ffmpeg output:

[Parsed_subtitles_0 @ 0x7fa134003dc0] fontselect: (Arial, 400, 0) -> /usr/share/fonts/noto/NotoSans-Regular.ttf, 0, NotoSans-Regular
[Parsed_subtitles_0 @ 0x7fa134003dc0] Glyph 0x62C not found, selecting one more font for (Arial, 400, 0)
[Parsed_subtitles_0 @ 0x7fa134003dc0] fontselect: (Arial, 400, 0) -> /usr/share/fonts/noto/NotoSansMath-Regular.ttf, 0, NotoSansMath-Regular
[Parsed_subtitles_0 @ 0x7fa134003dc0] Glyph 0x6CC not found, selecting one more font for (Arial, 400, 0)
[Parsed_subtitles_0 @ 0x7fa134003dc0] fontselect: (Arial, 400, 0) -> /usr/share/fonts/noto/NotoSansArabic-Regular.ttf, 0, NotoSansArabic-Regular

but when I use

ffmpeg -i 1.mkv -vf "subtitles=1.srt:force_style=FontName=Vazirmatn" -c:v libx264 -crf 20 -c:a aac -b:a 192k output.mp4

I get

[Parsed_subtitles_0 @ 0x7f5aa0003e00] fontselect: (Vazirmatn, 400, 0) -> /usr/share/fonts/vazirmatn/Vazirmatn-Regular.ttf, 0, Vazirmatn-Regular

then subtitle is correctly shown.

images for issue
first one is correct the other two are bad

Last edited by rezad (Today 07:35:57)