Patent US RE42441

This invention relates to a character display apparatus and method for a DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) player. According to the present invention, it is provided that font data of at least some of multi-languages to be used in multilingual subtitle processing are recorded on certain area(s) of a DVD, the recorded font data are stored in a font memory at initial stage of playback, the stored font data corresponding to a language selected by selection input of a user are then read, characters for subtitle processing of the selected language are displayed. Therefore, the manufacturing cost of DVD players can be reduced due to the reduction of memory capacity requied and DVDs can be maximum efficiently utilized. A character display apparatus for an optical disc player, and which includes a detection and separation unit to detect recorded data including a first font data from an optical disc, and to separate the first font data from the detected recorded data, a memory to store the first font data output from the detection and separation unit, a character generation unit to generate character signals for characters of a selected language for a subtitle by using the first font data stored in the memory, and a controller coupled to the character generation unit, to cause the character generation unit to generate the character signals for the characters of the selected language for character subtitle processing selected from multiple languages to be used in the character subtitle processing on the basis of the first font data. Further, the first font data is downloaded from the optical disc and stored in the memory such that the stored first font data is separate from the characters of the selected language before the character generation unit generates the characters of the selected language.