.SMI subtitles displayed as ?s and []s

[Needaname]

Trying to display Japanese subtitles. The title of the file itself is "BLOOD+.2005.EP03.x264.AC3-CalChi.smi" although I'm not sure if that helps at all.

I have turned off Formatted Subtitles in Input / Codecs - Subtitle Codecs - Subtitles AND Kate (although Kate doesn't seem to make a difference at all)
Opened the SMI file in Notepad++ and set the encoding to UTF-8
Changed the VLC's Advanced subtitles text encoding and the Simple subtitles default encoding (they seem to be seperate?...) to Universal(UTF-8)
The fonts I have tried are Meiro, MS Gothic, and DejaVu Sans. Testing Meiro on WMP half-worked.
Text Rendering Module is set to Freetype2 Font Renderer

All other settings are default

Did I miss something?

Trying Windows Media Player with DirectVobSub gets me a random string of Japanese characters when using Meiro font after doing Encoding - Character Sets - Japanese - SHIFTJIS, so I know that font can display the characters, yet DirectVobSub doesn't seem to have UTF-8 support? Or more likely there is something I'm doing wrong with the whole Encode in UTF-8 thing. Although it should be so simple. Trying to use SHIFTJIS encoding on VLC however, along with Meiro font, leads to complete strings of boxes with significantly less ?s, instead of a random string of Japanese characters. Not sure if that means anything but blech.

In Notepad++ in UTF-8, are the Japanese characters supposed to be displayed as a bunch of "xEA"s or "xA6"s and the like? Upon loading Notepad++ the characters, displayed in ANSI, appear as a bunch of abc characters with these little ' things over them and such. After doing Encode in UTF-8 I get the "xEA" problem thing. Pretty sure my problem is right here, but I have no idea what to do about this .

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

In Notepad++, you should see Japanese characters, IIRC.

[Needaname]

In Notepad++, you should see Japanese characters, IIRC.

Yeah... You know, I have like, this feeling... That I just wasted an entire day messing with subtitles that aren't even Japanese. If that's the case then *facepalm*

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

If you see ??? then it is the wrong encoding.
If you see [] then it is the wrong font.
Else, the file is not in a correct format.

[rocky]

How to get korean or other region subtitles working with VLC. The problem is because Unicode fonts on Windows are not installed by default, however on mac they are.
These steps works with both Windows 10 and macOS (OSX):

Go to VLC -> Preferences -> Subtitles/OSD.

1) Set default encoding to the one that is reported by Notepad++ at the bottom right.
2) Set font to "Arial Unicode MS"

In Windows 10 you have to install then manually, the fonts are copyrighted. Microsoft Office and other software install them depending on the program and version. On OSX they in "/Library/Fonts/Arial Unicode.ttf"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial_Unicode_MS

Additionally, you can leave the default encoding to your local or default setting and convert the SMI file to UTF-8-BOM with Notepad++ for example. That way the UTF8 with BOM already has the encoding inside.

Example to test:
https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/17257

Search too for malgun gothic or batang or gulim fonts.