text encoding problem

[afteryouwho]

Hi all.

I have been using ffmegx for mac mountain lion for a long time now to add subs to my avi files. But I have run up against a problem I hope someone can clear up for me.
I am trying to embed Spanish subs from a .srt file to an avi file for a friend. I have checked the file with text edit and it is all good.
However, when I go to embed the subs the text comes up all garbled in the sense that all the accented vowels (a,e,i,o,u) and special characters like the ñ show up on the preview (and the embedded subs) all wrong.
I have tried changing the text encoding to practically every possibility but can't find how to have the text show up as Spanish.
Can anyone tell me how to do this?

Thanks.

[Case]

I have checked the file with text edit and it is all good.

Open the .srt in TextEdit, Save as… (keep the option/alt key pressed while accessing the File menu). Select any of the available (=supported) text encodings. (If your file contains any characters that are not supported in some of the listed text encodings, then these will be greyed out.) Change the default suffix to .srt again. Add the chosen text encoding to the filename, so you'll know just by looking at the filename, e.g. foo.spa.iso-latin-1.srt or foo.spa.utf-8.srt . Now you won't have to guess the correct text encoding, because it is exactly how you set it.

The logical choices for spanish are, imho, Windows-1252 (CP-1252), ISO 8859-1, or Unicode UTF-8.
TextEdit calls these Western (Windows Latin 1), Western (ISO Latin 1), and Unicode (UTF-8).
ffmpegX calls these CP1252, ISO-8859-1, and UTF-8.

However, when I go to embed the subs the text comes up all garbled in the sense that all the accented vowels (a,e,i,o,u) and special characters like the ñ show up on the preview (and the embedded subs) all wrong.

There was a long standing bug in ffmpegX 0.0.9t and later, that made some subtitling functions not to work. It would show fine in Preview for all matching settings, but the final encoding would revert back to default settings. Anyway, recently a workaround was found.

However, you mention the unintended rendering in BOTH preview and final output. And the issue above does not apply to any spanish characters, with the correct text encoding, when rendered in Arial. I tried all three suggested text encoding for verification.

I have tried changing the text encoding to practically every possibility but can't find how to have the text show up as Spanish.

The text encoding of your .srt file must match the text encoding that you set in ffmpegX. If these differ, then you will likely see unintended characters (e.g. é, Ã-, ñ) or underscore replacement characters ( _ ).
Furthermore, the selected font must contain these characters. The Arial that ffmpegX uses, has all these for spanish.


(actual rendering by ffmpegX, fresh install.)

[afteryouwho]

Thanks for your speedy reply. Will try all your suggestions and hope I find the solution. This is not something I do regularly but it is always good to know how to manage different aspects of this kind of thing.
Am saving it for further reference.

Thanks again.