Fix subtitles that show odd symbols instead of letters
Drop the file; the page guesses the encoding from the text itself. If the letters still look wrong, pick the language it is written in, and save it as UTF-8.
Where the odd symbols come from
Older subtitle files were saved in the code page of their language — one for Western Europe, another for Cyrillic, Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Chinese. The file does not say which, so a player that guesses wrong shows the same bytes as different letters: é instead of é, п instead of п, boxes instead of Chinese.
Here the encoding is guessed by trying the common ones and keeping the one that comes out as letters of one alphabet rather than a jumble of symbols. It is usually right; when it is not, the “Text looks wrong?” form lets you pick the language, and the text is read again at once.
Saving as UTF-8
Whatever the file came in, it is saved as UTF-8 — the encoding modern players, TVs, YouTube and video editors expect. That is the whole of “convert SRT to UTF-8”: open, check the letters look right, save.
Questions
- The letters look right here but wrong on my TV.
- The TV reads the original file in its own code page. Save it from here: the copy is UTF-8, which modern TVs read without guessing. A very old TV may still need its own code page.
- Only some lines are broken.
- Then the file was already damaged when it was saved: it was converted twice, or two files in different encodings were glued together. The lines with odd symbols are marked in the table; fix them by hand by clicking a line.