How can I change the encoding of a subtitle file?

Question

I downloaded a Greek subtitle for a movie, and this is what I see when I open it with Gedit.

enter image description here

Subtitle works great on VLC, all perfect. But what if I want to edit this subtitle with some Greek words? I instantly get an error about character encoding.

enter image description here

I hit retry and then VLC doesn't recognize the subtitles...

score 20 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:24

For subtitle edition/translation (text-based subtitles, that is), I strongly suggest Gaupol.

sudo apt-get install gaupol

Besides of gaupol, you can also try Subtitle Editor and Gnome Subtitles.

However, from the screenshots, it is clear that your .srt file is not encoded in Unicode.

As it turns out, iconv does change the encoding of the file to UTF-8, but the converted file will still have the same characters you see when opening in Gedit.

The solution I found is this:

Open Gaupol and go to menu File → Open or click on the button Open.
There is a selection menu in the lower part of the open window, titled Character encoding. Click on Other... (last option).
Select an appropriate encoding for your file, e.g. Greek ISO-8859-7, and click on the button Accept.
Now open your .srt file and make sure all characters are correctly rendered. Otherwise, repeat the above procedure with another encoding. You can run the command file -bi yourfile.srt to determine the correct encoding of your file (although I've read the results are not necessarily exact).
With your subtitle file open in the correct character encoding, now go to the menu File → Save as... and change the character encoding option (again, at the bottom of the window) to UTF-8 and save the file (possibly with a new name, for safety).

This same procedure of adding the codepage will work for Gedit. Yet I leave the instructions for Gaupol since this question is about subtitle files.

Good luck.

score 7 · Answer 2 · edited Aug 22 '13 at 00:17

7

iconv -f ISO-8859-7 -t UTF-8  Input_file.srt   > Output_file.srt

Open them from Kate editor you can see the proper text, if you still need to open them from Gedit, in other words, permanently change the codification run the above terminal command.

edited Aug 22 '13 at 00:17

Braiam

69,112

answered Aug 21 '13 at 23:54

billybadass

401

score 5 · Answer 3 · edited Apr 14 '15 at 12:45

I'd recommend enca. Unlike gaupol, you can handle not only subtitle-files, but any text file.

Install enca:
```
sudo apt-get install enca
```
To figure out the encoding of the file, see if enca can guess it:
```
enca <file>
```
or, if it fails and you know the language of the text file, than run for example
```
enca -L ru <file>
```
and see what it gives you. Get the list of supported languages from man enca.
I'd recommend to convert to UTF-8, you can do it by running
```
enconv -x utf8 <file>
```
or, again, if enca cannot guess the language by
```
enconv -L ru -x utf8 <file>
```
that should do the trick.

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Apr 15 '17 at 00:20

The problem is that Gedit (and many other linux apps) don't recognize correctly the text's encoding. VLC on the other hand is most probably set to recognize it correctly (through "Subtitle preferences" tab), and that's why you don't have any problem there. The solution is simple:

You don't open the file by double-clicking it, but through Gedit's "Open" dialog. There, you can find at the bottom left side a drop-down for Encoding, in which "Automatically Detected" is selected by default. Set it to "Windows-1253" or "ISO-8859-7" and you're good to go, the file opens correctly (and you can then save it to UTF-8 to avoid future issues)

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Sep 03 '20 at 08:28

You only need Excel to correct this. It is quite simple, just follow these few steps:

Open a new Excel sheet Go to "Data", "Get external data", "From text", and select your subtitle file. You may need to search for "all files" instead of leaving it on ".txt" only.

Then, you can select the right encoding in the following window. Try most of them and preview the result. You will have to pay attention to 2 things:

eliminate all delimiters, to keep you text in one piece
put the "column data format to "text" (otherwise, Excel could take the minus sign for a formula)
import the data from the cell you like (A1 is OK of course).

Your text is perfectly encoded in Excel. You just have to copy/paste it all in a new .srt file.

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Feb 19 '14 at 06:56

0

Another subtitle editor that allows for converting into different formats (and comes with tons of features) is Aegisub. It's native format (.ass) is supported by VLC Media Player as well as MPlayer and converting to it should fix encoding issues.

answered Feb 19 '14 at 06:56

LiveWireBT

29,597

score 0 · Answer 7 · answered Sep 01 '14 at 14:55

0

For translating SRT files you also can use DualSub. It is open-source (GPLv3) and cross-platform. It uses Google Translator.

answered Sep 01 '14 at 14:55

Boni García

186

score 0 · Answer 8 · answered May 15 '15 at 14:19

For your general informations, now there is subtitle-index.org, it concentrates a lot of subtitles, rank them along multiple criterias (duration, spell check, lisibility, encoding), and offers the best one in direct download as UTF-8.

Working pretty fine, it avoids encoding problems which are pretty commons and annoying.

MojiProg · Answer 9 · 2017-01-08T17:59:13.593

This is a Python3 function for converting any text files including subtitles into the ones with UTF-8 encoding.

def correctSubtitleEncoding(filename, newFilename, encoding_from='ISO-8859-7', encoding_to='UTF-8'):
    with open(filename, 'r', encoding=encoding_from) as fr:
        with open(newFilename, 'w', encoding=encoding_to) as fw:
            for line in fr:
                fw.write(line[:-1]+'\r\n')

How can I change the encoding of a subtitle file?

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