Poles and MicroDVD (.txt) Subtitles

[Nikephoros]

Everytime I download a movie from some Polish torrent site they always have MicroDVD subtitles in .txt extension. Can any Pole or anyone explain this? Do Poles use DVD/DIVX set-top players that only support MicroDVD format or something?

I know this is not a very important question, I am just curious that is all.

[Worst]

Yeah, this also engaged my attention...

Heh... Maybe in Poland they have some deviancy for *.txt format, cus on every polish subtitle site you find only *txt subtitles. Who knows????

Maybe someone form Poland will explain it to us?????

Do Poles use DVD/DIVX set-top players that only support MicroDVD format or something?

Can U imagine that?

[lm81]

I'm from Poland, but I don't know why most of polish subtitles are in .txt format. I always convert subtitles into .srt format.

Lately we have a very big problem with subtitles. Police has blocked the most popular site with polish subtitles - napisy.org. Some people were arested. I hope this madness will stop very fast.

We don't have access to new subtitles now.

[ixquic]

more about the raids: polishlinux.org slashdot

[easy_man]

I think there is rather simple explanation. Most people in Poland to watch movies on PC use very good polish players/subtitle editors like:
Subedit Player - http://subedit.com.pl/
BestPlayer (older) - http://www.bestplayer.com.pl/
This soft is very easy to use, works with subs formats: MicroDVD, TMP, MPL2 (and some more) and can autodetect format, so this is enough to put subtitles in *.txt file
Most movies are in DivX/XVid, and nobody hassle with converting it back to DVD. Even many cheaper standalone DVD players sold in Poland reads DivX/XVid and subs from *.txt.
I think that formats like MicroDVD, MPL2, TMPlayer are much easier to use from programmer perspective, and for translator/watcher too. They are easy convertable too.

EDIT
One more thing, meybe the most important: polish character encoding. Most popular players lacks support for it, so we had to write our own, thats made formats they use most populat, and now this is a habbit .

[eduo]

A small clarification:

Recognizing an extension that is not the correct one doesn't make the polish players "Good". It makes the players and their users mediocre.

A better question would be: Does the extension need to be TXT or the proper extensions are supported as well?

Because I, for one, would vote against serving .TXT files and when receiving them renaming to the proper format. Really.