The VideoLAN Forums

Posted: **10 Aug 2020 09:30**

In a mkv file the subtitles lines including music notes (♪) are displaying as (â™ª)

I have tried setting "default encoding" language under settings to "default (windows-1252)" and all utf variations.

Using mkvextract --fullraw I see "C3 A2 E2 84 A2 C2 AA" which is being interpreted as utf and turned into â™ª
But when I use

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mkvextract <file> tracks -c windows-1252 2:subs.srt

and load subs.srt it works correctly (but not if I use -c utf8)

EDIT: Why does VLC's reading of this line not match mkvextract / iconv (see 2nd post)?

---

Debug info

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vlc --version
VLC media player 3.0.8 Vetinari (revision 3.0.8-0-gf350b6b5a7)

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mkvextract <file> tracks -c windows-1252 2:subs.srt
[Script Info]
; Script generated by FFmpeg/Lavc58.55.100
ScriptType: v4.00+
PlayResX: 384
PlayResY: 288

[V4+ Styles]
Format: Name, Fontname, Fontsize, PrimaryColour, SecondaryColour, OutlineColour, BackColour, Bold, Italic, Underline, StrikeOut, ScaleX, ScaleY, Spacing, Angle, BorderStyle, Outline, Shadow, Alignment, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV,  Encoding
Style: Default,Arial,16,&Hffffff,&Hffffff,&H0,&H0,0,0,0,0,100,100,0,0,1,1,0,2,10,10,10,0

[Events]
Format: Layer, Start, End, Style, Name, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Effect, Text
Dialogue: 0,0:00:01.24,0:00:03.91,Default,,0,0,0,,[bright tone]
...
Dialogue: 0,0:03:48.91,0:03:50.50,Default,,0,0,0,,♪ ♪

The encoding from Styles is 0 which according to http://moodub.free.fr/video/ass-specs.doc means
"Encoding. This specifies the font character set or encoding and on multi-lingual Windows installations it provides access to characters used in multiple than one languages. It is usually 0 (zero) for English (Western, ANSI) Windows."

If I use

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mkvextract <file> tracks -c windows-1252 2:subs.srt

gedit shows the correct character (and vlc displays them correctly)
"Dialogue: 0,0:03:48.91,0:03:50.50,Default,,0,0,0,,♪ ♪"

If I use

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mkvextract <file> tracks --fullraw 2:test.txt

ghex shows
"113,0,Default,,0,0,0,,......."
and bytes (hand transcribed so ~5% error rate)
"31 31 33 2C 30 2C 44 65 66 61 75 6C 74 2C 2C 30 2C 30 2C 30 2C 2C C3 A2 E2 84 A2 C2 AA 20 C3 A2 E2 84 A2 C2 AA"
the text portion is "C3 A2 E2 84 A2 C2 AA" which interpreted as utf[1] turns into â™ª

[1]https://utf8-chartable.de/unicode-utf8- ... 28&names=-
https://utf8-chartable.de/unicode-utf8- ... 28&names=-

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mediainfo <file>`
Text
ID                                       : 3
Format                                   : ASS
Codec ID                                 : S_TEXT/ASS
Codec ID/Info                            : Advanced Sub Station Alpha
Compression mode                         : Lossless
Writing library                          : Lavc58.55.100 ssa
Language                                 : English
Default                                  : Yes
Forced                                   : No
Statistics Tags Issue                    : mkvmerge v24.0.0 ('Beyond The Pale') 64-bit 2019-08-17 01:03:24 / Lavf58.30.100 
FromStats_BitRate                        : 103
FromStats_Duration                       : 00:27:52.958000000
FromStats_FrameCount                     : 796
FromStats_StreamSize                     : 21706

Posted: **10 Aug 2020 10:20**

I followed this a little deeper by building mkvextract from source and adding some debug statements.

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$ echo "113,0,Default,,0,0,0,,â™ª â™ª" > test.txt
$ hexdump -n 180 test.txt
# Verify this matches "31 31 33 2C 30 2C 44 65 66 61 75 6C 74 2C 2C 30 2C 30 2C 30 2C 2C C3 A2 E2 84 A2 C2 AA 20 C3 A2 E2 84 A2 C2 AA"
00000000  31 31 33 2c 30 2c 44 65  66 61 75 6c 74 2c 2c 30  |113,0,Default,,0|
00000010  2c 30 2c 30 2c 2c c3 a2  e2 84 a2 c2 aa 20 c3 a2  |,0,0,,....... ..|
00000020  e2 84 a2 c2 aa 0a                                 |......|

$ cat test.txt | iconv -t utf-8
113,0,Default,,0,0,0,,â™ª â™ª
$ cat test.txt | iconv -t windows-1252
113,0,Default,,0,0,0,,♪ ♪

So it looks like this only works when iconv (what mkvextract uses under the covers) is pointed at windows-1252.

Posted: **10 Aug 2020 10:27**

Searching some more I found this comment (from 2010) saying you can't change the encoding on SSA/ASS subtitles?

https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.ph ... 91#p249717

Posted: **10 Aug 2020 18:43**

The ♪ character does not event exists in Windows-1252, so for sure that's not the correct encoding. That sequence C3 A3 ... AA is UTF-8 encoding for â™ª, or Windows-1252 for Ã¢â„¢Âª. In any case, I think this is handled by libass, not VLC.

Posted: **10 Aug 2020 20:06**

Thanks, could you confirm that VLC is not passing encoding to libass?
I spent sometime looking at this file ([url=https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/ ... c/libass.c]modules/codec/libass.c[/url)] and I don't see any encoding being passed to libass here, but I obviously don't know all the other places it could happen.

Posted: **10 Aug 2020 22:18**

As far as I know, ASS text is always UTF-8 encoded. There's nothing for VLC to give or libass to take in this respect. And I don't see how that would fix the problem.

The author botched the encoding by opening the UTF-8 text as if it were Windows-1252 and then converting the result to UTF-8.

The correct byte sequence for the music note sign is E2 99 AA.

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