Strange characters in subtitles despite being in UTF-8

General Discussions
1

Every now and then a movie with embedded subtitles (have never happened with external subtitles) will get strange characters instead of Å, Ä and Ö that we have here in Sweden. It’s relatively rare but when it happens it is really, really annoying.

According to a google search it’s because the subtitle is not encoded in UTF-8. But when I open the movie in the program “mediainfo” it says this:
Text #9
ID : 12
Format : UTF-8
Codec ID : S_TEXT/UTF8
Codec ID/Info : UTF-8 Plain Text
Language : Swedish
Default : No
Forced : No

So I’m guessing that the codec isn’t the problem?

What else could be the cause for this?

PMS version: 1.32.8.7639

Thank you and a happy new year :slight_smile:

2

Could be the original text file wasn’t actually encoded as UTF-8 but when adding it as a track it’s been tagged as such.

There’s tools to extract the subtitles… and tools to help determine the actual encoding… and tools to apply it to UTF-8 or set the actual encoding in the track tags. I’m not aware of a tool that’ll do all that in one go or even automatically.

3

Extract the subtitle, store it in SRT format, zip it and then drag the zip into the message editor here.
That way several people can look at it and determine whether it is just a wrong encoding or something else.

You can use Subtitle Edit or MKVtoolnixGUI or similar software to do it.