The VideoLAN Forums

Please can someone give me some easy to understand help?

I have an xvid file of an English language movie. (I am in China and am trying to make it possible for my friend to view this film with Chinese subtitles, which I have downloaded.)

So I have 3 .srt files. One is English subtitles, which seem to work OK when I do the browsing for the subtitle file routine.

One is definitely Chinese, which doesn't work at all with the same method. If I browse through the list of formats and pick Big5 it displays little squares where the characters should be. So what am I doing wrong?

You should change the encoding of the subtitles to make it work correctly

Yeah thanks, but how do I do that?

It's in the advanced section when you select the sub and may be permanently changed in preferences, input/codecs, other codecs, subtitles

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

Ha ha... thanks so much for the speedy and ever so helpful advice.

Beg your pardon for being sarcastic, but I think I indicated in my very first posting (perhaps not with appropriately exact terminology) that I had already tried switching the encoding to Big5 with no effect.

After waiting so long for the help of 'the experts' ( ) I simply tried every single encoding format in that list and none of them worked.

Finally in desperation I resorted to using Windows Media Player, and guess what... it worked perfectly.

Trying everyone in the list would be very time consuming and considering The complexity to the particular character set it is likely you missed it. There may be another issue at work here and that is the font supporting the Unicode characters. The freetype 2 font renderer can support windows Unicode fonts after the proper character set has been selected.

I'm guessing his situation is closed to what I had before? I managed to get my Chinese SSA subtitles working by going to Settings -> Preferences -> Video -> Subtitles/OSD -> Text renderer and manually type C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\ARIALUNI.TTF into the Font textbox, and it worked even when I left Subtitles text encoding to Default. Maybe that will work for SRT subtitle files as well?

i'm having the same problem but then how come when i go to preferences -> video -> there is nothing that mentions subtitles or OSD. And it isn't in the advanced options either. I'm using the videolan v.8.5

Actually it's Preferences, Video, Subtitles/OSD, Text renderer under "Font", but you will need to manually type in the path and font name. Don't forget to turn on the module in Preferences, Video, Subtitles/OSD under Subpictures filter module "Freetype2 font renderer".

Where as "Subtitles text encoding" is found in Preferences, Input / Codecs, Other codecs, Subtitle.

When you have finished making changes press Save and restart the player for the changes to take effect.