The VideoLAN Forums

Hi folks.

I'm English but I live and work in China.

I use the VLC Media Player on my PC and love it.

Sometimes I like to show movies to Chinese friends. It can be difficult to find subtitles for many things but sometimes I'm lucky.

At the moment I have 2 .srt files for a particular movie. One is in English and works fine. The other is "Big 5" (which I think is Chinese, correct me if I'm wrong anyone.) Anyway the Big 5 one won't work. At all.

Now it could be regional settings or some such, I know. But I'm running VLC (with English as the selected language) on a PC with a Chinese version of Windows. Everything's Chinese except for various things that I've put on it to use, such as VLC.

Any ideas anyone? I'd be grateful for any help.

Windows is divided into groups as far as languages are concerned. You will need to select the correct ISO character set for subtitles. This is available in Preferences, Input / Codecs, Other codecs, Subtitles "Subtitles text encoding" or in advanced settings when selecting an external subtitle, under "Subtitle text encoding".

http://alis.isoc.org/codage/iso8859/jeuxiso.en.htm
ISO Standard for various characters sets

Ah thanks, that gets something displaying, shame that there's obviously something amiss with the file anyway.

You might need to try all the encodings listed to get it to work really well.

Tried them, no joy. C'est la vie!