Problem with Non English(Farsi, …) subtitle

Question

When I want see movie or video in mac os x (with VLC, DivX Player, Quick Time) and want to load subtitle these video player application can't load my subtitle correctly and show in strange text.

my subtitle languages is Farsi (rtl language). I think I must change some unicode settings but I don't know where anyone have any idea?

Answer 1

According to Trezoid answer on superuser the solution is:

By default the language encoding on VLC (and possibly others) is set to "default" which is windows-1252 (possibly only if your language is set to english, but I'm not sure)

This will not display other languages very well. To fix it, open up VLC preferences, click on the Subtitles and OSD tab, and change "default encoding" to UTF-8

This will give the program a much wider choice of characters to display from allowing it to render the characters as they should be.

Answer 2

I had the same problem and fixed it in this way: open VLC, preferences, subtitle/OSD, and change default coding to one of Arabic languages.

Answer 3

It could be (and looks like) a possible issue regrading encoding. It's probably not UTF-8, and something different.

That being said, if VLC can't play it nothing can. I suggest trying to find different subtitles.

Answer 4

Try with MplayerX which features:

• Auto detect the encode method of subtitle file (with Universal Charset Detector)
  • Now could support multiple sub files with different encode method
  • Load subtitles while playing - just drag or double-click it
  • Letterbox for the subtitles