Japanese subtitles are just boxes!?

Question

I'm going to watch a movie with some friends, but the subtitles I downloaded that are Japanese appear as only boxes. The characters aren't displaying right on my computer. I'm using VLC player, the file format of the subs is srt. The Japanese appears when I open the srt file in Notepad, but not in VLC...

Answer 1

In order to see Japanese characters on an English install of Windows, you first have to have the East Asian fonts installed, which you probably already do, since you see Kanji characters in Notepad. Open up the SRT file again in Notepad, and check what encoding the file is using. It should be "UTF-8". If it is not, then save the file, changing the encoding to UTF-8 before saving. Then, in VLC, open up the options control panel, making sure you are set to simple view, click on the "Subtitle & OSD" button, then set the "Default Encoding" to UTF-8.

Then, set the preferences to "show all", and go to Video / Subtitles/OSD, and set the "text rendering module" from "default" to "Freetype2 font renderer". The, go to Video / Text Renderer, and put in a Unicode font. It doesn't matter what Unicode font you pick, if its Unicode, it has the Kanji characters in it. Just pick one that is easiest to read on the screen, like an arial font. Note that the "browse" button here doesn't work as it should, due to the way Windows handles system fonts. You will have to manually type in the entire path to the font (or copy / paste the path from Windows Explorer address bar).

Save the settings and then RESTART the player, otherwise VLC will continue to use the old renderer settings till it gets restarted.

If that doesn't work, then you might try to hunt down a different version of the sub file. There are two basic ways to put subtitles in a computer file, either as plain text, as in the case of your SRT file, or as a graphical version, like they do on DVD's. The subtitles on DVDs are basically rasterized images of words, and not text files. Typically they come in two files, one is the image file, the other is the timing file. They have the extensions *.SUB and *.IDX. There will always be two files, both the same name, except for the file extensions. In other words, instead of having a single sub file called "Saving Private Ryan.srt", you will see two files, "Saving Private Ryan.sub" and "Saving Private Ryan.idx".

SUB / IDX files are typically much larger in file size than SRT text files, which is why you don't see them everywhere. They are often used just in this situation, though, because a lot of Windows systems don't have the East Asian fonts installed. With a graphical version of the subtitles, it doesn't matter. You could have literally no fonts installed on a computer and VLC would be able to display whatever language subtitle you download, since its only a picture of the words that it is overlaying the video frame.

If you have to use the SUB / IDX version of the subtitle, I can't recall if VLC has the ability to display those or not, but if it can't, then you can download a simple plugin called "VOBSUB". It works with most media players.

Answer 2

VLC can play some foreign subtitles, but not all. Not sure about Japanese.

Here is a link to a wiki on VLC that addresses some common problems:

http://wiki.videolan.org/Common_Problems

Down near the bottom of the page ("Subtitle Problems"), the issue is addressed.