Universal Subtitle Format (USF) was a CoreCodec project that attempted to create a clean, documented, powerful and easy to use subtitle file format. It is based on

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. ...

for flexibility, unicode support, hierarchical system, and ease of administration. USF subtitles are usually used in

Matroska Matroska is a project to create a container format that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture, or subtitle tracks in one file. The Matroska Multimedia Container is similar in concept to other containers like AVI, MP4, or Advan ...

containers. The format has come under criticism, especially from the

fansub A fansub (short for fan-subtitled) is a version of a foreign film or foreign television program, typically anime or dorama which has been translated by fans (as opposed to an officially licensed translation done by paid professionals) and subtitl ...

community, because compared to the format it aimed to replace, Advanced Substation Alpha (which is based on

comma-separated values A comma-separated values (CSV) file is a delimited text file that uses a comma to separate values. Each line of the file is a data record. Each record consists of one or more fields, separated by commas. The use of the comma as a field separat ...

), it is more verbose and far harder for software to read, write and manipulate. Also, it is not easily human readable and much harder to edit "by hand" in text editors such as Notepad. For these reasons, as well as the lack of a generic cross-platform parsing/rasterizing library and mature editing programs that natively support it, the format has not gained wide acceptance. No known media player software implements more than basic support for this format.

VSFilter DirectVobSub (formerly known as VSFilter) is a software add-on for Microsoft Windows (a DirectShow filter) that is able to read external subtitle Subtitles and captions are lines of dialogue or other text displayed at the bottom of th ...

, and

VLC media player VLC media player (previously the VideoLAN Client and commonly known as simply VLC) is a free and open-source, portable, cross-platform media player software and streaming media server developed by the VideoLAN project. VLC is available for d ...

(starting with the 0.9.0 release) can extract the subtitle text, timing information and very restricted formatting. Documentation for the format is now hosted by the Danish subtitling software company Titlevisio
here

Example

Below is the example USF file as presented in the v1.1 specification:
/ref> The Universal Subtitle Format sample off/name> [email protected] http://christophe.paris.free.fr/ English 2002-11-08 This is a short example of USF. Welcome to The Core Media Player TCMP_Logo.bmp Hi! This is a small sample, let's sing a song. La! La! La! Karokeeeeeeeee is fun !

References

External links

* {{Commons-inline, list= **

Timed Text Timed text is the presentation of text media in synchrony with other media, such as audio and video. Applications Typical applications of timed text are the real-time subtitling of foreign-language movies on the Web, captioning for people lacki ...

** Universal Subtitles Subtitle file formats