SSA text encoding

[Noam]

I've got an SSA file with Hebrew in it.
My DVD player plays my AVI video file fine with the subtitles, but the subtitle text comes up as gibberish.
As with HTML's text-encoding, I wondered to myself whether SSA has the possibility to encode text, too, to make it easier for my player to identify it as Hebrew. The DVD player I am referring to has played Hebrew subtitles before just fine, with DVDs from Blockbuster and the such.

Thank you for any help at all. I appreciate it.

[AlanHK]

Commercial DVDs aren't AVIs, the subtitles on video DVDs are a kind of bitmap. So any player can show any subtitle, regardless of the language they represent.
However, to use a text subtitle, like SSA, the player has to do a lot more to make the text appear on screen, so unless your player has a Hebrew (or Unicode) font built in, it won't be able to show these.

I think you can use a kind of bitmap subtitle with AVIs, and of course you could burn them into the image.

[Noam]

Then how would I add a kind of image layer onto my AVI?
What do I need to do to get my Hebrew subtitles to appear correctly?

[AlanHK]

Then how would I add a kind of image layer onto my AVI?
What do I need to do to get my Hebrew subtitles to appear correctly?

It depends on your player.
Software players may support all kinds of subtitle formats, hardware ones are less flexible. To begin, check the manual.