Converting UTF8 subs to srt/smi/sub?

[Agrippa]

Apologies if this has been up repeatedly. I did search, but found nothing useful.

I wonder if I can mux out the UTF8-encoded subs which often are included in MKV files and convert them into a format I can actually use, such as SRT, SMI or SUB. UTF8 is fine on the PC, but my BluRay/TV/DLNA server can't display them when I play the movies on the TV and I'm getting frustrated with having to go through dozens of downloaded subs in order to find one that works (when I find one at all).

Is there a (relatively) simple solution to this?

[Case]

MKVExtractGUI

[Agrippa]

I use mkvtoolnix to mux out the UTF8 subs already. The problem is that I need to convert those to a format I can use, much like the thread title says.

[jandor2009]

Use Subtitle Edit (Portable):

Click File
Import subtitle from Matroska file... and extract
File again
Save as... --> SRT (ANSI)

[AlanHK]

convert them into a format I can actually use, such as SRT, SMI or SUB.

All those format are text files.
You can convert between the text encodings in a text editor.

You can do it in Windows Notepad.
Open the SRT (or ASS)
Then "File/Save as"
choose the filename (use the same name to overwrite)
choose encoding as "ANSI".

Have a look through it to see if any glitches. Possibly accented characters could be mangled.

I don't use SMI or SUB, hopefully they work the same way.

You can use Subtitle Workshop to convert between formats.

[MilesAhead]

As AlanHK says, set the file save type to Ansi in notepad. Also because my set top box does not support those italic tags "<i> and </i>" you see in some .srt files or those color codes that start with a curly brace "{\a6}", I wrote a small program to read .srt and output .srt.strip file with the same base file name. Since color code braces are usually for song lyrics I remove them and insert ">>" at the start of the line to distinguish from dialog. The "<i>" type tags are just stripped out altogether.

It's free for you to use at your own risk and you can download here:

http://www.favessoft.com/downloads.html

[Agrippa]

Use Subtitle Edit (Portable):

Click File
Import subtitle from Matroska file... and extract
File again
Save as... --> SRT (ANSI)

Excellent, thanks a lot!

Thanks a lot for the suggestions folks, problem solved. Much appreciated!

[rax369]

Use Subtitle Edit (Portable):

Click File
Import subtitle from Matroska file... and extract
File again
Save as... --> SRT (ANSI)

Excellent, thanks a lot!

Thanks a lot for the suggestions folks, problem solved. Much appreciated!

I have converted lately lot of subs using that method, unfortunately SOME srt comes with symbols that will not be converted but changed by other "unknown" symbols by doing that.

So now I'm using this online tool, to convert all my UTF-8 srt files, to ANSI, but just selecting the parameters as follows:



Hope this help others.