Is there any way to position subtitles in Totem in a bottom on the black border of the 16:9 movie when showing in the full screen of 4:3 monitor?
Or not necessarely in fullscreen, but in a window where black borders are on the top and underneath the actual video frames.

Now always the subtitles covers part of the video on the bottom, which is a shame as there would be empty space underneath also.

The same question for VLC.

Subtitles, would be in the external file.
And I am not looking a solution which would need transencoding the video file.

btw, for GNOME Mplayer, the solution is to put "-vf expand=:-100::2" into Edit/Preferences/Mplayer/Extra_options_to_Mplayer

Actually it is even easier, on the subtitle preference page, just adjust the subtitle lower margin option.