The VideoLAN Forums

I'm having trouble getting Japanese subtitles to display correctly in VLC 1.1.5. I've looked through other posts related to the issue but they all suggest simply changing the font. My problem is changing the font doesn't seem to do anything. Not only does it not fix the problem, but the font doesn't even appear to change at all even after closing and restarting VLC.

What's happening is I'm trying to play back a MKV file with a Japanese UTF-8 encoded A*S (won't let me type the extension) subtitle file muxed in. Some of the characters appear correctly, while some appear as square and the hiragana/katakana appear to be in a different (somehow monospaced) font than the kanji:



The text appears properly in Mplayer Extended for OS X, but the subtitles are squished and stretched in a way that makes them difficult to read, which is why I would prefer to use VLC.

Could you send what it should be?

Sure. This is how Mplayer renders it. It's squished but at least all the characters are there.



The problem is even worse on my laptop where even after switching to a Japanese font (Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro and MS Gothic in this case) all of the characters are missing:



I've also tried it with 0.9.10, 1.1.3 and the 1.1.6 nightly and get the same results. I tried the 1.2.0-git nightly as well but I couldn't get it to run. It just sits in the dock bouncing while using 100% CPU. I can see if I can cut out a sample video if you think that'd help. The original video is 1440x1080 anamorphic at 20mbps though so it might be a bit hard.

Edit: Something else I've noticed. I had my laptop's system language set to Japanese. When I switch it to English like my desktop the subtitles on my laptop appear like the screen shot in my first post with only some of the characters missing.

Try getting a "unicode complete" font, such as Aerial Unicode MS, and selecting that as the font. It may be that the font you are using is missing characters?

I've tried it with Arial Unicode MS as well as all the other Japanese fonts I have on the Mac. What's weird is it seems to be ignoring my choice of fonts as even the characters that do show up correctly, don't change style at all when I change fonts even after restarting VLC and trying to set it in both the Basic options and under Video > Subtitles/OSD > Text Renderer for Mac in the Advanced options.

I am having issues in mplayer in Sabayon Linux, I know this is the VideoLan forums, but does anyone have an idea what the solution is? Switching fonts works in VLC, but VLC is so much slower than mplayer I would rather solve the issue in mplayer.

Note the "Dialogue: 0,0:02:18.78,0:027.66,Op - Top,,0,0,0,,"

@Tighe: This is a VLC support forum, please keep to VLC support questions. If you are finding VLC slower than MPlayer, then please start a topic for that issue and in the forum for the right OS. Anything else is considered bad form.

@chiklit: How big is the file in question? I would be interested in looking at this myself. If you have access to VLC on other operating systems, do you get the same behaviour there?

@Tighe: This is a VLC support forum, please keep to VLC support questions. If you are finding VLC slower than MPlayer, then please start a topic for that issue and in the forum for the right OS. Anything else is considered bad form.

Fair enough, I think I have the solution to the mplayer issue, I need to test it out tonight.

I did start a thread for subtitles being microscopic in VLC in linux, no one has replyed to it yet.

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