How to read this subtitle file?

[moviebuff2]

Hi everyone:

I got a .srt file which is said to be in Chinese.

I used Subtitle workshop to open it. The language was displayed as a bunch of weird symbols - not Chinese characters.

I used Wordpad to open the file. The same thing happened.

What do I need to display this subtitle file in proper Chinese characters?

Thanks

[AlanHK]

There are several different 2-byte encodings used for Chinese: Unicode, Big5 (Traditional) GB (Simplified). You need Chinese language support in the OS (especially if you are using Win98 as your profile says).

Try Aegisub (http://www.malakith.net/aegiwiki/index.php?title=Main_Page), it can handle Unicode at least.

[moviebuff2]

Thank you, AlanHK.

[moviebuff2]

Hi AlanHK:

I followed your link, and got the "severely outdated" version 1.10. When I ran it, I got the message that this version was for Windows 2000 and WinXP only.

Then I saw the instruction on where to get the pre-released version and went there.

I followed the instruction at this link http://malakith.net/aegiwiki/Pre-release_builds.

When I ran aegisub_r1515.exe, I got this error message:

"The procedure SHGetFolderPathW could not be located in the DLL SHELL32.dll"

What does this error mean?

[AlanHK]

If version 1.1 doesn't support Win98, then 1.5 will surely not. The error relates to a Windows system file which you don't have in your version of Windows, or have the wrong version.

I think you may be at a dead end.

Win98 needed a lot of help to use Chinese.
MS had a separate Chinese version, more modern Windows versions can just activate it as a language.
It's been along time since I used it, but perhaps a program like RichWin could help, but a quick search shows they're not active now, as it's basically obsolete. They had a version called "Richwin for Internet" which was free and allowed you to read, but not write, Chinese, in Win 95/98/2000.

I can't give you detailed advice on this, so proceed at your own risk.

[moviebuff2]

Do you think installing Chinese fonts (I think I can get them from Microsoft) will enable me to display the subtitles properly in WordPad?

[Midzuki]

Do you think installing Chinese fonts (I think I can get them from Microsoft) will enable me to display the subtitles properly in WordPad?

You MUST install fonts that contain Chinese characters in order to display
Chinese-written text in Wordpad, Winword, Chinese word-processors and
in web browsers as well. IE 4.x thru 5.x and/or MS Office have got the fonts
MS Song, MS Hei and (P)MingLiu.

=====

[Bjs]

http://mailer.fsu.edu/~flan/chinese/documents/word_processing.htm

Its now called jamondo.exe

http://www.microsoft.com/msdownload/iebuild/ime5_win32/en/119244.htm

[Midzuki]

LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL

http://mailer.fsu.edu/~flan/chinese/documents/word_processing.htm says:

Note: For the purpose of Chinese computing, it is preferable to use MS Internet Explorer as your Web browser because of its better support of Chinese capability than other browsers such as Netscape.

Why? This picture explains it all ^_^

P.S.: http://njstar.com/ might be interesting too.

=====

[moviebuff2]

Hi Midzuki:

I'm confused. Because, I have the font MingLiU and the script "CHINESE_BIG5".

However, even after I selected the font and the script in WordPad, the subtitles were not displayed in Chinese characters. They were displayed as a bunch of weird symbols.

I am only interested in displaying these characters, not writing.

[Ai Haibara]

You may also need to set the codepage to display the fonts correctly. However, why bother? You can use NJStar or MView (both shareware, though I'm not sure you can buy MView anymore. I registered it some years ago.) to display the text properly.

You can also try loading it as a document in your web browser, assuming you have the necessary Chinese support installed, then switch the encoding option to Chinese and see if it'll display properly.

[AlanHK]

One trick, try opening in your browser (IE, etc).

Just file/open and see what happens.

If it's still gibberish, try pasting these lines in the top of the file:

<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8"/>
</head>
<pre>

or

<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=big5">
</head>
<pre>

And try again

[Midzuki]

I use Gabest's TextSub DirectShow filter (Vsfilter.dll) to display
subtitles while watching videos on my PC. There is a version of
Vsfilter designed especially to work under non-NT Win32 OSs
(as it seems to be the OP's case). And as Ai Haibara pointed out,
it is also necessary to open TextSub's configuration applet and set its
"Style Editor" to use either CHINESEBIG5 (136) or GB2312 (134) encoding.

If moviebuff2 has already done this all, and the CJK characters from
TrueType fonts still refuse to appear on their PC's screen, then it is possible that
the actual problem is in the current driver of their video card ---
I know this may sound unbelievable, but it already happened to me... O_o

======

[moviebuff2]

Thank you for all your replies.

I downloaded and installed NJStar. The subtitle file is now displayed properly.