The VideoLAN Forums

Hello everyone!

VLC is avery capable player but I have noticed severe problems when trying to use spanish subtitles. The written spanish contains "é" and "ñ" among others and instead of these letters I get "?".

Maybe someone knows if this problem is known to the develeopers and worked on, or if it is just me who has it?

This might not seem like a big thing, but alot of films out there have subtitles in languages other than english, and to not be able to watch them correctly is very frustrating.

I'm terribly sorry if this problem is already discussed somewhere in this forum. I searched and only found the problem with arabic subtitles.

(On a very OT sidenote, I have to say that it's a bit bad that much software is so english centered. Support for other languages is often regarded as a to-be-implemented-in-a-distant-future feature even though english is only one of the major languages. I am obviously no programmer so I don't understand the usefullness with always having it divided into "english" and "the rest". But this is of course my own, personal and subjective opinion)

You probably did not select the correct character encoding in the subtitles preferences.

You probably did not select the correct character encoding in the subtitles preferences.

Ah, maybe that's the problem. I tried now to change into different character modes under "tools", "preferences", "Subtitles & OSD", "default encoding". Tried a few different ones there but they all seem to give the same "?" instead of certain characters. However, I downloaded Gnome Subtitles and tried to make the ".srt"-file into a ".sub" and now the .sub works with é and ñ! So the problem seem to be solved although not within VLC, but that's ok.

Do you have a copy of the failing .srt file?

Do you have a copy of the failing .srt file?

Yes sure, I have it. Shall I post it somewhere?

(I suspect that this whole thing is a user mistake though)

It's up to you. Don't ask me.

It's up to you. Don't ask me.

For me personally the problem is solved with using gnome subtitles so all is ok! Thanks for the help though!

The situation happens here and if someone could help, I'm curious to know why this problem occurs. Here's a copy of a buggy *.srt file.
http://www.4shared.com/document/Lc6TH80 ... _Eyes.html

Thanks

I tried that .srt with vlc-1.1.11 using "DejaVu Sans" and everything looks right here.
I think your using an font that doesn't support ñ.

First, I forgot to tell that this is a portuguese subtitle and we do not have ñ.
However, this is still quite strange since i'm using the same vlc version and font, but still getting the "?" on accented letters (an example could be the second subtitle at 2'07'').
It only works ok after exporting to a *.sub ! :/

Just as a reminder: a question mark is usually a sign of encoding problem. A square is a sign of a font problem.

Good reminder. Accented letters are represented by question marks on this case.

Here is the solution:
After investigation, when opening the subtitle file using PSPad, the file format (as shown at the status bar) is UTF-16 LE. This is the root cause. For VLC, the subtitle file is better to be in UTF-8 format. So, simply convert the UTF-16 LE format file into a UTF-8 format file with the same name. Then, VLC can display the subtitle correctly.

Hope this helps to the ones trying to figure it out!

I started by setting the default encoding to UTF-8 then turned to the forums and found no solution; however since most people here posted solutions related to encoding I went back there and managed to get the spanish characters to show correctly by going to Tools>Preferences>Subtitles & OSD, once there set the default enconding to System codeset.
Hope this help; I was about to give up when I found this fix.

This works with french as well !
Maybe VLC should inform of this parameter choice since I 'd tried, before I read this post, with almost all possibilites (but not system ). Simply add a comment in the subtitles and OSD box such as: for Latin languages use "system"

On Windows with Latin languages, "system" is the same as the default value, meaning CP1252, so I don't see much point in documenting it.

Personal Experience, it was an encoding problem. How did I solve it?
Two steps:

Changed the codification of the subtitle file from ANSI to Unicode UTF-8 using Notepad++, free for download.

Changed the Codification on System Preferences on the VLC Player, to match the codification to UTF-8.