The VideoLAN Forums

I have a movie and a subtitle along with it. The subtitle is a separate file from the movie (there is a .sub file and .idx file). When I try to play it, the subtitles do not show up. Furthermore, when I try to load the subtitles, it gives me error messages saying it could not be found.
When my brother plays the movie on his computer, it works fine. He doesn't have to load any subtitles; it works immediately. I checked his version of VLC and it says 8.2.

How can I fix this? I don't get why 8.2 would work and 8.5 would not.

can you provide your subtitles ?

sometimes it happens that subtitles with a bad character encoding won't load or display badly

if you can reencode it into UTF-8 or whatever encoding you want, that should be ok

Try selecting the IDX file. Assuming the file isn't damaged it should work. You may need to select your language after the movie starts by right clicking on the screen and scrolling down to Subtitles.

@funman In VOBSub? This is not the frame based .sub format you may be thinking of! While I will agree that Subtitle Text Encoding may still be an issue, quixotic115 seems to be having problems loading the sub. Or at very least this is the way it seems by the depth of the description.

Unable to open 'C:\Documents and Settings\Michael\My Documents\Downloads\Chow Movies\?????[???]\1994 From Beijing with Love [DVD-avi]\from.beijing.with.love.1994.dvdrip.cn.dual.audio.mrly.idx'

that's what I keep getting. I know where the file is and the path is correct. Also, my brother didn't have to load the subtitles at all; each different movie that had separate subtitles showed up on his computer.

no suitable access module for `C:\Documents and Settings\Michael\My Documents\Downloads\Chow Movies\?????[???]\1994 From Beijing with Love [DVD-avi]\from.beijing.with.love.1994.dvdrip.cn.dual.audio.mrly.idx'

so what's a suitable access module?

Are you sure that .sub file is in the same folder as .idx file?

Question marks are not allowed as directory names within Windows. So I must assume these are folders VLC can not recognize. Try placing the subs in another folder.

oh hey thanks that actually worked lol.

if i wanted to watch a different movie with diff subs, i would have to create a new folder and then put the subs in there?