The VideoLAN Forums

For those who have had issues with chinese subtitles and have scoured the forums looking for a solution only to come up empty, I have found the solution. Once you download the subtitles, open them with textedit or notepad. If it is a bunch of gibberish, then you will have to use google chrome(will work with firefox, the steps are pretty much the same). All you have to do is change the extension to .txt, and drag the subtitle icon onto a open google chrome browser. From there it should open up, and you will see the entire file. If it is still gibberish(tends to be most of the time for me), then on the google chrome menu bar select "view" and then "encoding." There will be a list of encodings that you can use to interpret the file. Select one of the chinese encodings until you get the perfect output(no gibberish). Copy the entire screen(Ctl+A->Ctl+C, or command+a->Command+C). Select the entire text file and paste the google chrome output you just copied. Save the textfile with the new output. You might get a message stating to save as "utf-8" or something like that. Save the document as UTF-8, and use the arial font in VLC to read the subtitles.

All those other threads did not point to any solutions, and it seemed like it was more guess work than actually coming up with a solution.