Japanese Subtitles - .srt files need shift-JIS?

Joon

To clarify, I'm trying to get subtitles in Japanese for English-speaking movies.

Now, I can find some .srt files without much trouble. I've used English subtitles for various movies before without issue. The ones that are supposed to be displaying Japanese, however, are displaying nonsense. Something like this: Ü‚¾ ‚P‚WÎ‚¶‚á‚È‚¢‚ñ‚¾. Now, in searching for answers, I found posts from others having this issue. They say that opening the .srt file in Notepad and saving it with shift-JIS encoding will fix it. If so, fantastic. But, I can't find how to do that.

Again, from those others posts, it seems to save in shift-JIS you need to have the Japanese character set installed. Which I do. I can read and type in Japanese without issue. But on the encoding drop-box in notepad, there's no shift-JIS.

Is there something else I need to do to be able to save in shift-JIS? Is there another simple, free program I can use to get the job done? Or, really, is there just something else I can do to get these subs to work properly?

Any help out would be greatly appreciated.

Nibble

There's a long explanation about how Windows and the state of Unicode compliancy in software sucks, but it's not necessarily helpful. Basically, you would normally have to go to Windows' language settings and change the "default character encoding" to Shift-JIS and reboot your computer in order to reliably display srt subtitles encoded in Shit-JIS in most video players; but then you would find that other software would have problems displaying text, and it's really just a big hassle.

There are two common solutions that I use:

1) Try KMPlayer. It was originally developed for use in Asia, so it can often display srt files in different Asian languages properly without needing to reboot your computer first.

2) Convert the subtitles to SSA/ASS format. This is the best solution, as it will allow the subtitles to be displayed properly by any program, on any operating system, as long as it supports the SSA format. To do this, I use Aegisub. Simply open the subtitles in Aegisub and click "Save as..." and save it in the ASS format. That's all you need to do. If you are using KMPlayer, you can adjust the size of the subtitles while watching the video; but for VLC, you may want to adjust the font size in Aegisub first. If Aegisub cannot automatically detect the encoding of the srt file, click "File" > "Open Subtitles with Charset..." and select the appropriate encoding (usually Shift-JIS for Japanese subtitles).

Nibble

I just re-read your post, and it seems I missed your main question; however, my original advice stands. The problem is probably not in the encoding of the srt files. They are probably already saved in either Shift-JIS or UTF-8. The problem is most likely with your software's ability to display Japanese srt subtitles on a Windows computer configured for English use. There are many ways to get around this, and I've tried a lot of them. I think the two methods I posted above are the best solutions for most people.

Joon

Beautiful! I downloaded Aegisub and it's exactly what I needed. My subs are working perfectly and I can even re-time them if they're a bit off.

Just what I needed! Thanks so much!

suburbanite

Silly question along the same topic: You said that you can find the Japanese subtitle files for English movies fairly easily. Can I ask where you've been finding them? I've finding it very difficult for some reason...