I’ve been looking for a example where I could see, how subtitles for mplayer can be mapped on a remote control. But my search have been quite unsuccessful. Looking for lircrc, example, subtitles and mplayer didn’t return anything meaningful.

And if you build (check out) mplayer from source, there is a file called input.conf in the etc directory, where you can look up the mapping of the keyboard. At least I thought so. In the man page you can read:

j
Cycle through the available subtitles.

but in the input.conf file there is no “j” and the appropriate command for it, which I could have used in my lircrc.

I still can’t believe that there isn’t an easy way to find an lircrc example, where this mapping can be looked up. It took me almost half an hour to find the appropriate commands for lircrc. Here they are:

So with this knowledge my .lircrc mplayer part for the subtitles looks like this (you need an appropriate lircd.conf, create it with irrecord):

begin
     remote = my_remote.conf
     prog = mplayer
     button = red
     config = vobsub_lang
end
begin
     remote = my_remote.conf
     prog = mplayer
     button = green
     config = sub_visibility
end
begin
     remote = my_remote.conf
     prog = mplayer
     button = blue
     config = switch_audio
end
begin
     remote = my_remote.conf
     prog = mplayer
     button = yellow
     config = osd
end

With this lircrc I can switch through all available subtitles, hide and make them visible again, and I can also switch through all available audio tracks.

Info:

• I usually build mplayer from source on a Ubuntu system with an Nvidia gfx card (here a x86_64 Jaunty Jackalope 9.04) like this:

  aptitude build-depends mplayer
  svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer
  cd mplayer
  ./configure --disable-x264-lavc --disable-x264 --enable-vdpau --enable-menu --prefix=/usr
  make && make install

• the switch_audio and osd commands aren't necessary in this example, but I've added them, because most of the people would add them anyway. --enable-menu is only needed in order to have On Screen Display (osd). It shows you e.g, if the playback is paused, the progress indicator of the movie (position), or the percentage of the position. The part with relation to subtitles is, that you can see the subtitle language while changing them if osd is enabled. You can see in the little opening image in the upper left how it looks like. The osd button turns this display on and off again.

Hope, I could help.