Python VLC MediaPlayer – Getting Subtitle Description

In this article we will see how we can get the subtitle description of the MediaPlayer object in the python vlc module. VLC media player is a free and open-source portable cross-platform media player software and streaming media server developed by the VideoLAN project. MediPlyer object is the basic object in vlc module for playing the video. We can create a MediaPlayer object with the help of MediaPlayer method. Subtitles are text derived from either a transcript or screenplay of the dialogue or commentary in films, television programs, video games, and the like, usually displayed at the bottom of the screen, but can also be at the top of the screen if there is already text at the bottom of the screen.

In order to do this we will use video_get_spu_description method with the MediaPlayer object

Syntax : media_player.video_get_spu_description()

Argument : It takes no argument

Return : It returns list

Below is the implementation

# importing vlc module
import vlc

# importing time module
import time


# creating vlc media player object
media_player = vlc.MediaPlayer()

# media resource locator
mrl = "death_note.mkv"

# setting mrl to the media player
media_player.set_mrl(mrl)

# start playing video
media_player.play()

# wait so the video can be played for 5 seconds
# irrespective for length of video
time.sleep(5)

# getting subtitle description
subtitle = media_player.video_get_spu_description()

# printing subtitle description
print("Subtitle Description")
print(subtitle)

Output :

Subtitle Description
[(-1, b'Disable'), (3, b'English (Full) - [English]')]

Another example
Below is the implementation

# importing vlc module
import vlc

# importing time module
import time

# creating vlc media player object
media_player = vlc.MediaPlayer()

# media resource locator
mrl = "1.mp4"

# setting mrl to the media player
media_player.set_mrl(mrl)

# start playing video
media_player.play()

# wait so the video can be played for 5 seconds
# irrespective for length of video
time.sleep(5)

# getting subtitle description
subtitle = media_player.video_get_spu_description()

# printing subtitle description
print("Subtitle Description")
print(subtitle)

Output :

Subtitle Description
[]