Subtitles display as "???" question marks ?

Frustrating

This happens often when i watch movies...yes,the downloaded subtitles , especially the cyrillic due the different encodings.

Now i'm going to show you how to fix that with few clicks , it's easy ! : )


1. First download notepad++ from here and install it.


2.Once downloaded , open the subtitle(.srt, .sub, .idx...etc) with notepad++ , just right click on the file. (Eg. image bellow)




3. Once opened , check the text whether is readable or not. If it is then ignore this step and if it's not - select all the text(press ctrl+a) , click on the Encoding tab and select the cyrillic(default encoding -windows ,eg. imagebellow).

In this case i've chosen cyrillic because the subtitle text is cyrillic , if the text is still not readable try the different types or if the language of the subtitle isn't cyrillic then select the appropriate encoding according to the language. Once the text is readable proceed to the next step.

Select encoding

4. Select all the text once again(ctrl+a) , click on the encoding tab and click on 'Convert in UTF-8'(eg. image bellow) and save the changes (click ctrl+a to save) and exit notepad++.
(Once converted do not expect any visual change on the text)

Converting

5. Open the media player(VLC media player in this case). Click on tools , then preferences , select Subtitles&OSD tab, chage the default encoding to Universal (UTF-8), click on save and restart the player. The same goes for the other players , change the subtitle default encoding to UTF-8.






6. Play the movie , add the subtitle and enjoy !






Hope it helps.
Good Luck ! : )



-Race