1. Subwave
2. Guides
3. Fix strange characters

How to fix strange characters in subtitles

When a player shows é for é, ¿ for ł, or boxes for whole words, the subtitle file was saved in an old text encoding and the player guessed the wrong one. The words are fine; they only need reading the right way and saving in Unicode.

Fix it in three steps

1. Open the SRT file in Subwave. It tries every common encoding and picks the one where the words look like words (Western, Central European, Cyrillic, Greek, Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Korean).
2. Check the words. Still wrong? Press the encoding button at the top (it says which one was used) and pick another: the preview shows the words in each.
3. Save as UTF-8 with Tools → Save as…. Every modern player reads it.

Old players

Some older TVs and players only recognise UTF-8 when the file starts with a byte-order mark. If yours shows strange characters even after saving, save again with UTF-8 with a byte-order mark.