Subtitles on Virgin Media

How are the fonts used on subtitling on VM generated? It looks like ITV have a different font on their ITV coverage to what we've had normally, whereas the font on Sky Sports News is as normal.

If it's the same as Freeview, they are sent as bitmap graphics. In effect, that means they can be in any font the broadcaster chooses.

Certainly if you look at ITV2's subtitles, they are in a completely different font to ITVs 1, 3 and 4

http://www.andrewjwood.eu/misc/subs-itv2.jpg
http://www.andrewjwood.eu/misc/subs-itv3.jpg
http://www.andrewjwood.eu/misc/subs-itv4.jpg

Yep - Freeview and Freesat use DVB Subtitling which (like DVD) uses a bit image sent by the broadcaster rather than text rendered in your set top box (which is WST - and used by analogue and Sky boxes)

Most Freeview broadcasters use Tiresias (which is optimised for the visually impaired to avoid confusion between 1, l and I for example) - and the ITV1,3 and 4 caps are in that typeface. ITV2 looks to be in something more generic Sans Serif - wonder if someone has fiddled with the subtitle generator config.

BBC HD is the odd-one-out BBC channel - but that might be because there isn't an HD resolution version of Tiresias? I think they're also using something like similar.

So what is the situation on virgin?

Looking at the screen grabs they are delivered using DVB Subtitles (if they were WST all subtitles would be in the same font - as WST subs are sent as text rendered into gfx by the receiver and thus all channels appear identical) - so probably the same on all DVB Subtitle platforms (assuming that Virgin are forwarding the subtitle stream the broadcaster provides)

There is a possibility that Virgin could be taking a satellite feed with WST and rendering this themselves into DVB Subtitles - but I very much doubt it.

Yesterday ITV1 during the football at least on VM was Helvetica (or something like it) while everything else was Tiresias.