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I have two movies, both using MKV containers, each has an SRT file with Simplified Chinese that can be read with GB18030 encoding via LibreOffice. So I assume they have the same or at least very compatible encodings.

Movie A's subs play just fine on both PC/Ubuntu and on Mac Mountain Lion.
Movie B's subs give mostly "?" with a few boxes and random chars.
I renamed A.srt to B.srt and vice-versa as an experiment. Clearly the subs now belong to the wrong movies, but bear with me.

Movie A can play subs, regardless of which source movie the subs belong to.
Move B cannot play subs, regardless of which source movie the subs belong to.
Thus, I infer that there is something in the MKV messing things up.

I've tried manually loading the subs, I've tried switching to all available subtitle tracks. No joy. What could possibly be in the MKV that is confusing VLC? More importantly, how do I get it fixed???

I should add this was tested on both:
1.1.12 - Ubuntu
2.0.2 and 2.0.3 - MAC OS X 10.8.1

... and I can now say they both play just fine on my older-model (Western Digital) WD HD TV Live. It looks like it is just VLC that has a problem.

Now if only I could take my WD HD TV Live and my big screen TV with me when I'm on the road for work ... !

??? means wrong encoding. Change the encoding to utf-8

I don't really understand what encoding you want me to change. The SRT file works perfectly ... just so long as I load it with a different movie. Consider this: I load it with the correct movie, and it is hosed. I load it with a completely different movie (just for kicks), and it works perfectly fine. So not sure what encoding I should be changing here. It seems the SRT is fine and the MKV has some meta data that is causing VLC to act funny.

BTW, tried your suggestion. No joy as suspected. And of course it broke every other movie in my lib. Every Chinese doc I've ever had at work or from online has been GB18030, not UTF-8.

This is because MKV supposes UTF-8 for internal SRT subtitles, I think. Why does it happen with external is the question...

I can confirm that *no* Chinese SRT loaded with the "bad" MKV will display correctly. This MKV is poison for all known-good Chinese SRTs that I have. Definitely a VLC bug, then.

@noah buddy
Can you provide sample patterns/files that describe this issue?
Maybe we can easily understand your issue if there are samples.

On VLC 2.0.3 or later, subtitles encoding GB18030 seems to work when "Universal, Chinese (GB18030)" is selected at Default Encoding in Subtitles & OSD tab in preferences.
MP4 + external SubRip (GB18030) works.
MKV (no subs) + external SubRip (GB18030) works.
MKV (with 16 languages subs) + external SubRip (GB18030) works.

Can't really provide samples since the problem is the movie file not the SRT file. Unless you have way to receive 10GB. It seems no one is really reading the problem description, so, oh well, whatever, I'll replace VLC with something else.

The SRT encoding should be irrelevant here. The SRT works fine when loaded with 7 different movies. It works incorrectly when loaded with 1 (unfortunately, the one it belongs to). In fact, loading *any* Chinese SRT with that movie file works incorrectly.

As I said, I'll just replace VLC. Start transcoding my files and playing with Quicktime. So please stop worry about the bug, no one seems to even understand the description anyway. I do *not* have problems playing Chinese SRTs! I do it all the time. I have a problem where one movie has some poison junk in it that makes VLC confused; VLC can no longer decode the subtitles, regardless of which subtitle file I load. The subtitle file can be from (presumably) any Chinese movie on the planet and it will still be broken, even though I can play the loaded SRT fine with any other movie.

> Maybe we can easily understand your issue if there are samples.

Well, let's try it again, then. Not for me, but for you all to improve your software. I don't care anymore, I've started moving away from VLC. I doubt the last description is going to help any more since it's the same as already mentioned many times.

A.mkv and A.srt --> these two files clearly belong together
B.mkv and B.srt --> these two files clearly belong together
...
Z.mkv and Z.srt --> these two files clearly belong together

- Playing movie A produces garbled subtitles
- Lots of weird debugging ... time passes
- Hmmm, I wonder if there is a problem with A.srt?
- I know, I'll load A.srt into another movie
- Open B.mkv. Load A.srt. Fast forward to first timestamp with a sub. Subtitles are perfectly fine.
- Repeat for C.mkv .. Z.mkv. Subtitles are perfectly fine.
- Wow, that's weird! Let's try the inverse.
- Open A.mkv
- Load B.srt. Subtitles are --please stay polite--.
- Load C.srt .. Z.srt. Subtitles are --please stay polite--.
- Conclusion: something inside A.mkv makes "all" subtitles --please stay polite--. "all" is only for Chinese, I did not bother testing any English subs.

Your agressivity and rudeness makes it quite difficult to solve the issue.

Anyway, I'll try to do something to change the encoding live, because this is too annoying.

I have the same issue too. Mine just shows up as squares. That usually means VLC can't find the proper font file to render the language, I was able to solve this problem in earlier when I was able to select the font file my subtitle can render. Now, I can't do that anymore.

This happens only on MKV files, if the file is MP4 or avi, the issue does not exist. I'm not sure if it is a container issue with MKV. I used Windows Media Player classic, the Chinese character displays properly.

I hope that helps.

I have the same issue too. Mine just shows up as squares. That usually means VLC can't find the proper font file to render the language, I was able to solve this problem in earlier when I was able to select the font file my subtitle can render. Now, I can't do that anymore.

This happens only on MKV files, if the file is MP4 or avi, the issue does not exist. I'm not sure if it is a container issue with MKV. I used Windows Media Player classic, the Chinese character displays properly.

I hope that helps.

This is a different situation. In your MKV you probably have a ASS track.

not sure if this will help, but over the last 5years this is the best solution i have to make VLC showing chinese subs:

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=80401#p316916