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hi all the experts,

i play a .avi file with subtitle .ssa. the subtitle is in Simplified Chinese.
i load it with GBK encoding.
however, the sub only shows square shape.

i'm running XP in English version.

What can i do?

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

I have the same problem and that ISO link doesn't help me in my case. I've managed to get my Chinese SSA subtitles working by going to Settings -> Preferences -> Video -> Subtitles/OSD -> Text renderer and put C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\ARIALUNI.TTF into the Font textbox. That is the Arial Unicode MS (TrueType) font in my system. I'm not sure if it comes in all versions of Windows/Office.

I've left Subtitles text encoding to Default and both Simplified and Traditional Chinese still display pretty good.

I have the same problem and that ISO link doesn't help me in my case. I've managed to get my Chinese SSA subtitles working by going to Settings -> Preferences -> Video -> Subtitles/OSD -> Text renderer and put C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\ARIALUNI.TTF into the Font textbox. That is the Arial Unicode MS (TrueType) font in my system. I'm not sure if it comes in all versions of Windows/Office.

I've left Subtitles text encoding to Default and both Simplified and Traditional Chinese still display pretty good.

That's very interesting! Considering the font renderer for subtitles needs to be turned on. Plus this is the only place in preferences to enter the subtitles fonts and isn't recognized unless the module is turned on. At least this has been my experience with it when I tried changing sub fonts.

I would have no idea how to turn on such module either, LoL. I'm very new at this and most, if not all, of the options are too advance for me I search the forum for anything to do with subtitles and most threads mention settings in Text renderer -> Font and/or Subtitles -> Subtitles text encoding, so my solution is purely by accident

I'm running English WinXP Pro, so I don't even know what fonts I have in my system at first. I open Office and under Format -> Font there's an Asian text font dropbox, I assume those would be the fonts able to display Chinese. Matching the name of the fonts to my fonts folder, I find that ARIALUNI.TTF or simhei.ttf can both display Chinese subtitles quite well, but ARIALUNI.TTF is better when Formatted Subtitles is checked.

I don't know if those fonts are installed with the OS or with Office or with something else. But looking at ARIALUNI.TTF it is the largest font file in my system, so I'm guessing it can display a lot of other subtitles files in different languages, without changing the settings at Subtitles text encoding ...

What's the difference between TrueType and FreeType2 fonts?

Preferences, Video, Subtitles/OSD near the bottom of that page is a section marked Overlays the check box marked "Freetype2 font renderer" must be checked in order for the text renderer to be active. Then the settings in Preferences, Video, Subtitles/OSD, Text renderer should work.

Try to load the Aerial Unicode truetype font. I could browse to it, VLC wouldn't load it or any other font in the windows fonts directory. But I could load it because Windows won't allow loading from this folder. So manually enter the path and name of the file.

C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\ARIALUNI.TTF

Yeah, I have trouble selecting those font files too. I have to type out C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\ARIALUNI.TTF by hand. I think that there's something wierd with the fonts folder itself, because I can select files in any other place but not in the fonts folder ...

Wierd thing too, that there's nothing checked for Overlays under Subtitles/OSD for my player, so in effect, text renderer shouldn't be loaded at all ... Yet, if I leave everything in default settings, my Chinese subtitles are squares, but with that font entered, they load up correctly as Chinese characters.

I'm running VLC 0.8.5, WinXP Pro SP2 and MS Office 2003, and other software, maybe there's something in the combination that caused this??

The two font types according to the Freetype2 information on the web are compatible. VLC uses this open source renderer.

Perhaps a developer will see this and comment here.

In the mean time I will try to get it to load again and if I can I will shed more light on the situation.

Maybe it's something to do with the SSA file as well? If I open the SSA file using Notepad, the Chinese and Japanese characters load correctly without the need to run any other programs ... I've uploaded one of the SSA files if it'll help in the troubleshooting:

http://www.badongo.com/file/1153231

Well! I see two problems.

1. The file was not saved as UTF-8. I would tend to doubt that the English subs in this file would work correctly either.

2. My system is in English and the text shows up as squares for both chn and jap when opened in any text editor. So Windows just like VLC the text is dependent on your system and the fonts character set loaded for your language, IE the text encoding method or character set selected. The methods suggested here should also work with the Freetype2 fonts included with VLC assuming that the correct character set is loaded and the file was saved as UTF-8

I found this on the web regarding the FreeType2 font engine used in VLC.

By default, FreeType 2 supports the following font formats.

TrueType fonts (and collections)
Type 1 fonts
CID-keyed Type 1 fonts
CFF fonts
OpenType fonts (both TrueType and CFF variants)
SFNT-based bitmap fonts
X11 PCF fonts
Windows FNT fonts
BDF fonts (including anti-aliased ones)
PFR fonts
Type 42 fonts (limited support)

I also tried this out using three or four different font types in VLC and it appears to work without problems. The only glitch encountered is using Browse to load the font as it needs to be loaded manually if the font is in Windows\Fonts directory.

Given that Arial Unicode (ARIALUNI.ttf) is language compatible to what ever is installed on your system. I would expect it to work similarly in VLC. This may be a resolve for some of the more difficult languages.

Using this font, I noticed trying several different languages that the SubTitle text encoding still plays a large part on the proper display of subs in any format. For all the subs I tried ISO-8858-1 worked well for me, better than the default, but given, I only tried western European languages I'm not surprised.

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

The switch in Preferences --> Video --> Subtitles/OSD "Freetype2 font renderer" Under Subpictures filter modules appears broken as all of the settings were available and did work with or without this switch set for this filter module.

DJ

hey....guys im having the same problem but with arabic so i need this arialuni code font where can i get it from??? i dont have it in my pc.

It seems that this font is only distributed with Microsoft office and is one of the few fonts Microsoft provides to support Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Hebrew. Microsoft has claimed copyright infringement for sites trying to redistribute this font. So for the most part it has disappeared outside of Microsoft.

There is a Windows 9x - Me version but it is not Unicode.

The only thing I was able to find is this:

http://www.lightworker.com/Download/Fonts/ARIALUNI.TTF

http://www.sys2.com/support/downloads.aspx

This may or may not work as expected.

Thanx DJ
This link provided by funguy solved my problem http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287247#appliesto

Hey people
I downloaded the font Arialunicode but still the arabic letters appear to be separate and not connected .......plz help

I have the same problem at first as the person who started this thread. Following the methods I managed to display the subtitles instead of squares. But the subtitles, which are in chinese, are wrong, they are displayed incorrectly and are not even words. I opened the .srt file in notepad and found that the words are wrong there as well. But when i open it with microsoft word, it was able to display the characters correctly. Can anyone help me solve this?

Change the font within VLC and Notepad to a Unicode font like was recommended earlier in this post. Check to be sure the character set in Subtitles text encoding in VLC is correct.

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

I've changed the font within vlc to the arial unicode ms already, that was why i didnt get squares for subtitles. Then ive also changed the font in note pad to arialunicode, but the problem persists, the chinese characters are still displayed incorrectly.

How do i check that the character set in subtitles text encoding in vlc is correct?

ok i got it after reading thread "HOWTO Solve the disappearing subtitles with 0.8.5" by the admin.
"Go to Preferences, Input/Codecs, Other codecs, Subtitles" and then i chose GBK and then it worked.