Subtitles not displaying correctly in VLC

Question

VLC player is not showing subtitles correctly. It's just showing capital "A"s in place of the correct text. Please check the screenshot attached to this post.

Do I need to install a missing font? How can I fix it?

Can I export .srt file from the subs embeded into this mkv file?

Answer 1

Try changing the subtitle encoding. I don't have access to vlc at the moment but it there is an option in the preferences to set the encoding. I would first try UTF8.

You may also need a font that can display your language.

Answer 2

You can sometimes fix that by editing the files of the subtitles. The Plain with border style wasn't displayed correctly in these subtitles:

[V4+ Styles]

Format: Name, Fontname, Fontsize, PrimaryColour, SecondaryColour, OutlineColour, BackColour, Bold, Italic, Underline, StrikeOut, ScaleX, ScaleY, Spacing, Angle, BorderStyle, Outline, Shadow, Alignment, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Encoding
Style: Default,Trebuchet MS,40,&H00E6F4FC,&H000000FF,&H00000000,&H00000000,-1,0,0,0,100,100,0,0,1,1,1,2,10,10,10,1
Style: Plain with border,Arial,30,&H00000000,&H000000FF,&H00FFFFFF,&H00000000,0,0,0,0,100,100,0,0,1,2,0,5,10,10,10,1    

It was fixed by changing the bold attribute from 0 to -1. You can also just delete the styles completely. See docs.aegisub.org/manual/ASS_Tags for a reference of the ASS syntax.

You can extract subtitles from mkv files with mkvextract:

brew install mtoolnix
mkvextract tracks test.mkv -c UTF-8 3:test.ass

Another common issue is that VLC shows characters that aren't included in the default subtitle font as rectangles. It can be fixed by just changing the default font. You can also change the text rendering module to CoreText font renderer, but it makes text too thin in my opinion.

MPlayerX substitutes characters from other fonts by default. It has that second issue with some subtitles, but some are shown correctly by default.