Hardsub Japanese Subtitles.

[MountyBounty]

Hey, I'm trying to hardsub an anime. When a play the anime in vlc for example (softsub) I get the right subtitles. But when I hardsub it (MP4, MKV) everything is good but the Japanese subtitles are "blocks" (squars). I encode, hardsub it with MeGui (Also Ripbot but I guess because of the subtitles in won't start encoding.) Please some help on how to do this.

[jman98]

This kind of thing happens all the time with non-Latin based languages when the user has a computer whose language uses the Latin alphabet. Here's the fastest way to fix this.

1) Open the subtitles file in a BROWSER - yes a browser - and change the character encoding until you see characters instead of blocks. Cut and paste the entire file into a text editor like Microsoft Word, WordPad, Libre Office Writer, etc. Now this is the tricky part - you MUST save the file as encoded ASCII and encode it to Unicode UTF-8.
2) Install Xvif4PSP. Use it to encode your file and give it the subtitles file you saved in step 1. It will absolutely hard encode your subtitles.

I have used this method to produce videos with hard coded simplified Chinese subtitles recently when nothing else would work.

Finally, note that I am assuming that your Japanese subtitles are in SRT format. My method will not work if they are not in SRT or some sort of text based format.

[MountyBounty]

This kind of thing happens all the time with non-Latin based languages when the user has a computer whose language uses the Latin alphabet. Here's the fastest way to fix this.

1) Open the subtitles file in a BROWSER - yes a browser - and change the character encoding until you see characters instead of blocks. Cut and paste the entire file into a text editor like Microsoft Word, WordPad, Libre Office Writer, etc. Now this is the tricky part - you MUST save the file as encoded ASCII and encode it to Unicode UTF-8.
2) Install Xvif4PSP. Use it to encode your file and give it the subtitles file you saved in step 1. It will absolutely hard encode your subtitles.

I have used this method to produce videos with hard coded simplified Chinese subtitles recently when nothing else would work.

Finally, note that I am assuming that your Japanese subtitles are in SRT format. My method will not work if they are not in SRT or some sort of text based format.

But they are ass./ssa. :'(

[El Heggunte]

Avisynth + TextSub() filter (from VSFilter.dll) should work with properly-written "UTF-16" .SSA/.ASS files.

[jman98]

If you want to convert from SSA to SRT, my method works for sure. It's your call here.

Note that El Heggunte's suggestion that it should work is not a 100% guarantee that it will work. I tried this method with Chinese SRT subtitles and it did not work for me, leading my use of the method I described earlier.