Philips 5990/12 and asian subtitles

[saladbowl]

I bought the Philips 5990/12 but it won't read Japanese or Korean DivX subtitles (comes out all gibberishly) I entered the language code 7465/7579 but nothing happened.
The official firmware didn't make a change. Is there a firmware out there that can fix the problem?

[jman98]

Philips DVD players that support Divx typically only support a subset of possible character sets. If you bought your player in Germany, then it likely only supports Latin and Cyrillic and nothing else. There may or may not be a firmware with CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) support. If your player isn't sold in that part of the world, then there won't be any firmware with support for this. If you really and truly can read Japanese and Korean than you should be able to do a web search in those languages for such firmware. Note that DVD players that support Divx subtitles almost never support Unicode, so your subtitles will need to be in some non-Unicode character set for Japanese or Korean to work, but I have no idea which ones might be supported. Philips support for Cyrillic was bizarre at first with only ISO-8859-5 being supported. That's an old character set that nobody has really used in years. Eventually they supported CP-1251. Why am I telling you this about Cyrillic? Simply to point out that if their Cyrillic support is any guide, you may find that Japanese and Korean are only supported in very uncommon character sets.

If all else fails, with the right tools you should be able to re-encode your videos with hard subtitles. By "hard" I mean that the subtitles are embedded in the video and cannot be turned off - they are always "on". There may be some quality loss with this, but it may be your only option.
We get posts here from time to time about people who buy DVD players in Europe and then take them to Israel or the Middle East and can't get Arabic and Hebrew subtitles to work for Divx, so this problem of all possible character sets not being supported is common.

[saladbowl]

Thank you for your detailed answer.
Damn it, I should have bought an LG Player...
The people I got the player for, do read Japanese and Korean, but I don't and on the other hand they aren't very familiar with searching the internet for firmware updates, so...I guess I'll try the re-encoding with hard subtitles.
Thanks again for the taking the time to post.

[vb6rocod]

Thank you for your detailed answer.
Damn it, I should have bought an LG Player...
The people I got the player for, do read Japanese and Korean, but I don't and on the other hand they aren't very familiar with searching the internet for firmware updates, so...I guess I'll try the re-encoding with hard subtitles.
Thanks again for the taking the time to post.

Try with Vobsub sub/idx (Txt2VobSub - search for this is a free program). Take ~ 1 min to get subtitles. SET MODE RGB (i don't test on 5990 but in other philips models this work).

[saladbowl]

Thank you very much vb6rocod, I'll try it out.

[newnews]

You can use AVIAddXsubs to add subtitle to an AVI file, it take 1~2 minutes only. Then you can watch any subtitles in your 5990.

[Ai Haibara]

Won't that only work (AVIAddXSubs) if the hardware (the OP's 5990) supports displaying Japanese/Korean text-mode subtitles?

[c0m1c]

I'm hoping that you solved the problem already but FYI...

AVIAddXSubs works great! It took me a while to figure out how to make Korean subtitles work on the 5990 but this is what I did...

All my Korean subtitles came in .smi format. So the first thing I did was to convert it to .srt using Subtitle Workshop. Then I used AVIAddXSubs to create a DIVX file by inputing the .avi and .srt file. (make sure they are in the same folder with the same name/diff. extension).

IMPORTANT: Go to configuration and make sure the character set is HANGEUL and Language is Korean (ko). If you don't do this, the subtitles will come out in random ascii characters. Then hit convert and you'll have a divx file complete with Korean subtitles in less than 3 mins.

Makes sure you turn subtitles on using your remote on the 5990.

This is much better than hard-coding the subtitles because you do not lose any quality and you can turn them on or off. Try this method. It worked for me.

[jman98]

c0m1c - Thanks for taking the time to post about something that worked to solve this problem. Hopefully your solution will be useful to others who might have this problem in the future.

Welcome to the forums!