When I try to watch movies with russian subs I get gibberish (with hebrew characters).
I found that I can change the system non-english support language (something like that) and then it will support russian. But then I'll get the same problem with hebrew subs.
Is their any way I can have support in both languages at the same time?
p.s I use WIN7
Best Answer
There are several steps you have to take:
You must use a DirectShow filter for subtitles rendering that supports Unicode (like DirectVobSub). Your movie playing software must of course use that filter, it's impossible to say how exactly since you didn't say what movie player you use.
You must use a font that has all the characters you need (e.g. Arial, the default, works fine, don't change it to something fancy as Hebrew support in fonts is patchy at best)
Most important: your subtitles must be encoded in UTF-8.
a. If your subtitles are external, just use software like iconv (Windows version) to convert your subtitles into UTF-8, just make sure you use correct source encoding (Windows-1255 for Hebrew and Windows-1251 for Russian) and the target must always be UTF-8.
b. If your subtitles are internal to your video file, you'll need to extract them first. For MKV files, use mkvtoolnix to extract subtitles, transcode them same as in "a" above and pack them back into MKV. For other video file containers, use their appropriate tools to extract subtitles.