The VideoLAN Forums

I am on Mac OS X Lion 10.7.3. I have just installed 2.0 and cyrillic subtitles can't be decoded correctly, the cyrillic characters appear as squares. I have even reinstalled VLC 2.0 cleanly (removed old cache) and still can't make them working. I am using Windows-1251 encoding in the VLC settings which is the correct one. I have uninstalled VLC 2.0 and reinstalled 1.1.9 and the same subtitles are rendered correctly with Windows-1251 encoding.

Can confirm this with Chinese subtitles as well.

Solution: Change font in preferences to Arial Unicode MS.

What VLC should do is to fall back to another font for characters not in the default font (Arial something, I always change this to Lucida Grande 11), but it does not in 2.0.0.

This is a bug, please file a bugreport.

When you play with Cyrillic subtitles, you need to set the font contains Cyrillic glyphs.
Similarly when you play with Chinese subtitles, you need to set the font contains Chinese (CJK) glyphs.

VLC does not have fallback mechanism like choosing another font when the font has no glyphs for the language.

This is a bug, please file a bugreport.

I think ticket 5847 is suitable for this issue.

Btw, any plans to incorporate an encoding menu for subtitles (as in currently used subtitle)? I find it rather tedious converting .srt files to UTF-8 manually...

Btw, any plans to incorporate an encoding menu for subtitles (as in currently used subtitle)? I find it rather tedious converting .srt files to UTF-8 manually...

Do you mean VLC should detect subtitles file encoding automatically?

Do you mean VLC should detect subtitles file encoding automatically?

That would also be nice, although what I am talking about is a menu item to choose encoding manually for the current subtext when it is not UTF-8 (or cannot be determined automatically).