Regression Causes mplayer-gui Crash at Start of SSA/ASS Subtitles

[joe@…]

Somewhere between Fedora 15 and Fedora 16 there was a regression that causes mplayer-gui to crash the moment SSA/ASS rendered subtitles begin. Disabling SSA/ASS subtitle rendering resolves the issue, but leaves the user with subtitles that look quite terrible in certain circumstances (unicode in subtitles, position info is printed to the screen as text, etc).

I tried downgrading all of these packages, but none of them were able to alleviate the issue.
a52dec-0.7.4-15.fc11.x86_64.rpm
celt-0.10.0-2.fc15.x86_64.rpm
faad2-libs-2.7-1.fc11.x86_64.rpm
ffmpeg-libs-0.6.90-0.2.rc0.fc15.x86_64.rpm
freeglut-2.6.0-6.fc15.x86_64.rpm
fribidi-0.19.2-3.fc15.x86_64.rpm
gstreamer-plugins-bad-free-0.10.21-4.fc15.x86_64.rpm
lame-libs-3.98.4-1.fc14.x86_64.rpm
libass-0.9.11-3.fc15.x86_64.rpm
libcaca-0.99-0.11.beta17.fc15.x86_64.rpm
libdca-0.0.5-5.fc12.x86_64.rpm
libmpeg2-0.5.1-8.fc12.x86_64.rpm
librtmp-2.3-2.fc14.x86_64.rpm
libva-1.0.12-1.fc15.x86_64.rpm
libvdpau-0.4.1-4.fc15.x86_64.rpm
libXScrnSaver-1.2.1-2.fc15.x86_64.rpm
lirc-libs-0.9.0-1.fc15.x86_64.rpm
live555-0-0.30.2011.01.24.fc15.x86_64.rpm
mencoder-1.0-0.123.20110412svn.fc15.x86_64.rpm
mplayer-1.0-0.123.20110412svn.fc15.x86_64.rpm
mplayer-common-1.0-0.123.20110412svn.fc15.x86_64.rpm
mplayer-gui-1.0-0.123.20110412svn.fc15.x86_64.rpm
x264-libs-0.0.0-0.29.20110227.fc15.x86_64.rpm
xvidcore-1.3.0-0.1.rc1.fc15.x86_64.rpm

Unfortunately, it crashes simply by vanishing from the screen, so I don't have any error message or backtrace.

Any thoughts on what could be causing it and how to resolve it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Joseph D. Wagner

[joe@…]

Confirmed bug is in libass, documented here:
​https://code.google.com/p/libass/source/detail?r=0b709a5df697b36a24e4456b24585ec8f0c54b63

Upgrading to libass-0.10.0 resolves the issue.