

Here is a solution for virtually any file format that is supported by ffmpeg (even remote files are supported). This will open the VLsub interface where you can add details for searching and downloading subtitles. Next, hover down the options available and click on “ VLsub ” as shown in the screenshot above.

Now make sure the font is set to Arial Unicode MS, other unicode fonts should also work.

Step 3: expand the Subtitles / OSD item, and select text renderer. Step 2: in the bottom left corner of the preferences screen underneath show settings, select the all radiobutton

Step 1: open the VLC settings by pressing Ctrl+ P or by going to Tools > Preferences If you are sure the file is encoded in UTF-8 but the subtitles still show up as boxes or weird symbols, you should make sure you are using the right font in VLC. You can easily convert a text file to unicode with the convert to UTF-8 tool. You need to convert the subtitles to UTF-8 for them to be readable in VLC. The second picture is the same file converted to UTF-8, displaying correctly. The first picture shows a file using Chinese text encoding, and can't be read by Notepad or VLC.
