subtitles showing like chinese

[forare]

hello all,

I have a bunch of divx with their srt files in Arabic but everytime i load the srt file in vlc or smplayer it shows
like question marks or strange and unreadable characters, if i load english subtitles it will work just fine but not the arabic ones , i tried this on many different pcs and same story everywhere, please is there a way to fix this ?

thanks for any help

[jman98]

The title of your post is horrible. "question marks or strange and unreadable characters" are NOT "like Chinese" as your title says. In fact, saying "Subtitles showing in strange unreadable characters" would have been accurate. We know what that means.

Anyway, SRT files are text files. The problem is that American computers aren't typically installed to display anything but Latin characters. Open the SRT files with some text editor like Word or Wordpad. Do the characters look OK to you? If not, you'll have to do something like this. Go to Control Panel -> Regional And Language Options -> Advanced and change "Select a language to match the language version of the non-Unicode programs you want to use" to whatever version of Arabic (there are a lot of them) is appropriate. You may have to reboot. Note that this will change the display of some of your programs to Arabic or mess them up completely. There are potential negative consequences of doing this, but it may be the only way to get the subtitles to work. If you have a way to install Arabic fonts on your PC, that may possibly fix the problem without doing what I suggested. Also if you can figure out a way to change the SRT files from whatever character set they are in to Unicode and save that, that may allow VLC and smplayer to work OK. Note that Unicode subs have many drawbacks as most standalone DVD players can't play them and most subtitle programs can't use them as input.