Arabic subtitles automatically downloaded from opensubtitles.org showing as gibberish on all my clients. I tried the Web App and on Xbox One. Please advise on how to fix that. Previous threads on similar topic dos not have clear solution
@amrabed said:
Arabic subtitles automatically downloaded from opensubtitles.org showing as gibberish on all my clients. I tried the Web App and on Xbox One. Please advise on how to fix that. Previous threads on similar topic dos not have clear solution
Hi Amrabed, my i ask if you could solve this problem?
im facing exactly the same but was not able to solve it till now.
how can we submit a feature request and get votes on it to fix this issue?
I apologise for bringing up an old post. But it seems no one posted their fix, so I’ll volunteer in helping out as I do have my own solution.
To understand subtitles (especially .SRT) Arabic words should be Encoded in UTF-8 in order for the letters to be read right.
What you’re experiencing with gibbirish words is that its actually encoded in ANSI format, which is foreign to arabic (or any other language other than English for example portugese, Brasil, Spanish etc…) words.
Opensubtitles agent automatically downloads the most relevant subtitles based on the hashtags of the movie, and most of it is encoded in ANSI.
As a solution, you need to manually locate the .SRT subtitles then Open with… ==> Notepad. Then goto ==> File —> Save As…
then at the bottom right corner of the Notepad theres “Encoded” with a scroll down menu, change it from ANSI (or whatever it was Encoded with) to UTF-8. Then hit “SAVE” button.
A pop-up window will appear asking whether you want to over-write the save file or not, It’s your personal preference if you want to keep a backup of the old “bad” encoded, as for me I always over-write it.
There are many agents/scripts on the net that can fetch you UTF-8 SRT subtitles or re-encodes all your SRT subtitles to UTF-8. The one’s i’m using is SubLight “http://www.sublight.me/welcome/” which does a batch download for tv show seasons or movies to UTF-8 subtitles, or use CpConverter “https://sourceforge.net/projects/cp-converter/” which can do a batch conversion from ANSI to UTF-8 (choose Source Encode: Arabic (Windows) - 1256 … and Output Destination: Unicode (UTF-8) )
PS: I am in no way related to those mentioned programs above, as I’m only using them as an example as I already use them myself.
You could also use FIlebot to fetch you SRT subtitles, then manually change the ANSI encodes to UTF-8.
Edit: Also Subtitle Edit “https://github.com/SubtitleEdit/subtitleedit/releases” or “http://www.videohelp.com/software/Subtitle-Edit” is a really powerful subtitle conversion, can convert between encoded subtitles or convert between subtitle formats (from ASS, IDX, VOB etc… to .SRT)
