A portable caption decoder / renderer for handling ARIB STD-B24 based TV broadcast captions.
While CEA-608/708 closed caption standards are used by the ATSC system in North America, DVB Subtitles / DVB Teletext defined in DVB standard are used in Europe and many parts of the world, Japan established its own TV broadcasting standard ISDB that includes a kind of caption service defined in ARIB STD-B24 by the Association of Radio Industries and Businesses (ARIB).
Brazil also adopted ISDB-T International for their broadcasting by establishing Brazilian version SBTVD / ISDB-Tb based on the Japanese standard, which has been widely used in South America countries and around the world. Brazilian version also includes a caption service for Latin languages defined in ABNT NBR 15606-1 which is modified from ARIB STD-B24 specification. Philippines also adopted ISDB-T International based on the Brazilian standards, but uses UTF-8 for caption encoding based on the Japansese specification ARIB STD-B24.
Though ISDB-based TV broadcasting has been operating for about 20 years, ARIB based caption is still lacking support in general players.
libaribcaption provides decoder and renderer for handling ARIB STD-B24 based broadcast captions, making it possible for general players to render ARIB captions with the same effect (or even better) as Television.
libaribcaption is written in C++17 but also provides C interfaces to make it easier to integrate into video players. It is a lightweight library that only depends on libfreetype and libfontconfig in the worst case.
libaribcaption is a cross-platform library that works on various platforms, including but not limited to:
- Windows 7+
- Windows XP+ (libfreetype required)
- Linux (libfreetype and libfontconfig required)
- Android 2.x+ (libfreetype required)
- macOS
- iOS
- Support captions in Japanese (ARIB STD-B24 JIS), Latin languages (ABNT NBR 15606-1) and Philippine (ARIB STD-B24 UTF-8)
- Full support for rendering ARIB additional symbols (Gaiji) and DRCS characters
- Lightweight and portable implementation that works on various platforms
- Performance optimized (SSE2 on x86/x64) graphics rendering
- Multiple text rendering backend driven by DirectWrite / CoreText / FreeType
- Zero third-party dependencies on Windows (using DirectWrite) and macOS / iOS (using CoreText)
- Built-in font fallback mechanism
- Built-in DRCS converting table for replacing / rendering known DRCS characters into / by alternative Unicode
CMake 3.11+ and a C++17 compatible compiler will be necessary for building. Usually you just have to:
cd libaribcaption
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build . -j8
cmake --install . # Optional
By default libaribcaption is compiled as static library, indicate ARIBCC_SHARED_LIBRARY:BOOL=ON
to build as a shared library:
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DARIBCC_SHARED_LIBRARY:BOOL=ON # or -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS:BOOL=ON
libaribcaption has several CMake options that can be specified:
ARIBCC_BUILD_TESTS:BOOL # Compile test codes inside /test. Default to OFF
ARIBCC_SHARED_LIBRARY:BOOL # Compile as shared library. Default to OFF
ARIBCC_NO_EXCEPTIONS:BOOL # Disable C++ Exceptions. Default to OFF
ARIBCC_NO_RTTI:BOOL # Disable C++ RTTI. Default to OFF
ARIBCC_NO_RENDERER:BOOL # Disable the renderer and leave only the decoder behind. Default to OFF
ARIBCC_IS_ANDROID:BOOL # Indicate target platform is Android. Detected automatically by default.
ARIBCC_USE_DIRECTWRITE:BOOL # Enable DirectWrite font provider & renderer. Default to ON on Windows
ARIBCC_USE_GDI_FONT:BOOL # Enable GDI font provider which is necessary for WinXP support. Default to OFF.
ARIBCC_USE_CORETEXT:BOOL # Enable CoreText font provider & renderer. Default to ON on macOS / iOS
ARIBCC_USE_FREETYPE:BOOL # Enable FreeType based renderer. Default to ON on Linux / Android
ARIBCC_USE_EMBEDDED_FREETYPE:BOOL # Use embedded FreeType instead of searching system library. Default to OFF
ARIBCC_USE_FONTCONFIG:BOOL # Enable Fontconfig font provider. Default to ON on Linux and other platforms
By default, libaribcaption only enables DirectWrite on Windows and CoreText on macOS / iOS without any third-party
dependencies, But you can still enable the FreeType based text renderer by indicating
-DARIBCC_USE_FREETYPE:BOOL=ON
.
For Windows XP support, you have to turn off DirectWrite (which will result in a crash), enable GDI font provider and FreeType:
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -ARIBCC_USE_DIRECTWRITE:BOOL=OFF -DARIBCC_USE_GDI_FONT:BOOL=ON -DARIBCC_USE_FREETYPE:BOOL=ON
For enabling FreeType text renderer on Windows, consider using vcpkg
or msys2
for accessing third-party libraries.
If you are under some kind of environment (like Android NDK or Windows) that is hard to prepare system-wide installed FreeType,
consider using embedded FreeType by indicating -DARIBCC_USE_EMBEDDED_FREETYPE:BOOL=ON
.
This option will automatically fetch and compile a static-linked FreeType library internally.
libaribcaption could be imported through find_package()
if you have installed it into system:
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.11)
project(testarib LANGUAGES C CXX)
find_package(aribcaption REQUIRED)
add_executable(testarib main.cpp)
target_compile_features(testarib
PRIVATE
cxx_std_17
)
target_include_directories(testarib
PRIVATE
${ARIBCAPTION_INCLUDE_DIR}
)
target_link_libraries(testarib
PRIVATE
aribcaption::aribcaption
)
Or using add_subdirectory()
to import source folder directly:
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.11)
project(testarib2 LANGUAGES C CXX)
set(ARIBCC_USE_FREETYPE ON CACHE BOOL "Enable FreeType") # Indicate options here (optional)
add_subdirectory(thirdparty/libaribcaption)
add_executable(testarib2 main.cpp)
target_compile_features(testarib2
PRIVATE
cxx_std_17
)
target_link_libraries(testarib2
PRIVATE
aribcaption::aribcaption
)
Or using pkg-config if you have installed it into system:
# Link to libaribcaption static library
gcc main.c -o main `pkg-config --cflags --libs --static libaribcaption`
# Link to libaribcaption shared library
gcc main.c -o main `pkg-config --cflags --libs libaribcaption`
See the comments in public headers, and sample code with ffmpeg
libaribcaption's C++ headers are also written in C++17. If your environment doesn't support C++17, consider using the C API or switch to a newer compiler.
The C API (public headers with ".h" extensions) could be useful for calling from Pure C or other languages, see capi sample for usage.
These fonts are recommended for Japanese ARIB caption rendering:
Windows TV MaruGothic
Hiragino Maru Gothic ProN (macOS)
libaribcaption is released under MIT License. You should include the copyright notice and permission notice in your distribution.
ABNT NBR 15606-1
ISDB-T Standards (Philippines)
libaribcaption is heavily inspired by the following projects: