The VideoLAN Forums

I have VLC 1.0.5 and Mac OS X 10.6.3. I encountered, for the first time, an error with the subtitle rendering. I loaded up a Spanish-language SRT subtitle file for an English-language video file. All of the upside-down question marks (¿) and vowels with accents (é, ó, í, et cetera) just showed up as regular question marks.

Is there a way I can check if this is an error with the subtitle file itself or of VLC's processing of said file? Thanks for any help!

Except for ASS subs, you can change the subtitle character encoding in the preferences.

Thanks so much! I love the fact that I can do this on a file-by-file basis instead of needing to change my universal settings. I was just wondering if you know which of the many encodings might remedy the above problem. Thanks again for your help and the great program!

Rather than create a separate post for the same issue, I'll just say that I'm running the latest version of VLC and OS X (now 1.1.5 and 10.6.5, respectively) and I'm still curious about which character encoding I should choose for Spanish-language subtitles. I've tried about fifteen of them and they all encode characters like "¡", "¿", "ü", "É", and "à" simply as "?". Thanks for any help!

Spanish is usually UTF-8 or Windows-1252. Default settings should work.

Hi Remi, I have installed the latest version of VLC on my Mac, with the last Mac OS, and the spanish subtitles doesn't work properly. I have tried UTF-8, windows-1252... all the the codecs and doesn't work, always show regular question marks for special spanish characters. How can I solve the problem?.
Thanks!

I don't know. Try another operating system.

Same problem with Spanish subtitles here, Windows and Knoppix-Linux same behaviour. Opening the .srt file with a Notepad and saving it again as UTF-8 file solves the problem. The new UTF-8 .srt file displays correctly, no matter what VLC encoding preferences are chosen.

A problem are Hebrew subtitles. No chance to display them correctly.

Trying to show non-Unicode subtitles in more than one script, or rather encoding, at a time is not possible. I don't really see any way around this. Automatic detection schemes for legacy encodings are all complicated and unreliable. So yeah, you cannot mix Hebrew and Spanish unless you use Unicode or go through the preferences all the time.

Until the fansubbers get a clue and switch to Unicode, that's the story.

As for the Spanish problem, you'd have to tell the correct encoding and/or provide a sample file fi you want help.

As posted by “spanish” 2011-01-12 the default Windows-1252 VLC encoding doesn't work with a .srt file saved in that text mode. TrueType and OpenType fonts display question marks for all characters above number 128. Same issue here: http://www.mactalk.com.au/56/101676-vlc ... cters.html, where the language is French.

As a user, before attempting to handle multi-language subtitles, I would like to have problems with the single language ones solved first.

Something must be wrong with your SRT files if neither Windows-1252, nor UTF-8 nor UTF-16 work. French text is usually Windows-1252, Latin-1 (ISO 8859:1) or rarely Latin-9 (ISO 8859:15), which are mostly interchangeable encodings, or sometimes Unicode. Without sample files, I am going to have to assume that your subs are buggy.

I had exactly the same problem and no matter what I did in VLC and which codec I selected it always showed the "?" character instead of the proper one.
The solution is quite simple: Your srt file has been saved using an incorrect encoding.

1. Open your .srt file in notepad
2. Edit/Select all
3. Format/Font...
4. Select whatever font you like but make sure that the "Occidental" script option is selected.
5. Save as...
6. In the "Save as..." window, input whatever name you'd like for your .srt file (include the .srt so notepad doesn't save it as .txt) and (this is the important part):

MAKE SURE THAT IN THE ENCODING OPTION, UTF-8 IS SELECTED.

7. Open VLC and use this new .srt for your subtitles...


You are good to go...

I use vlc for all my movies awesome quality but suddenly my subs stopped working i dont know why i have encoded them to Greek windows 1253 until now it was perfect everything was fine but suddenly something happened and it just showing question marks in old movies when i use the subs they are working good but in new movies that i downloaded it is not working but when i open with bsplayer they work fine please what is the problem i love vlc i dont wanna use bs player i use bs player just to find the subs