Some characters in subtitles being shown as boxes

I've noticed that certain characters, like dashes, are displayed as boxes in some mkv files which have built-in subtitles. This, I think, is a character set issue. Is there a setting for that in MPC-HC as there is in VLC?  I'm not finding it, if it's there. VLC doesn't show the issue, and I believe the "Encoding" option in the Subtitles section there, which defaults to ANSI, could be the key to this. Does MPC-HC default to ANSI?

I'm testing on Win10, Nvidia, latest Standard. Thanks.

You can find text encoding option here:
MPC-HC options > Subtitles > Default Style

Wow, I missed that somehow.

It is on ANSI by default, though there's also a "Default" choice, but it didn't make a difference.

I was wrong about what VLC is on: it's set to "Windows-1252":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252

Both use Arial.

This only happens on a portion of files that I come across, not all, so maybe it's not worth worrying about, though it is curious. "ANSI" and "Default" are apparently less than "Windows-1252."

Windows-1252 is the same as the ANSI value in MPC-HC.

Usually one of the other encoding options gives the correct characters.

I've since noticed that for the files where this happens at all, that it will show in PotPlayer also, in exactly the same way. So it seems that when it comes to this, PotPlayer handles the characters in the same way.

VLC continues to never show the problem.

Do you have a recent example of such a file? A link to a torrent is fine.

Thanks. This one, for example:
https://clicknupload.org/8q08h4d9hecp

Note that it's not in every single thing said, but you won't have to watch for long to see it.

Download link doesn't work for me, but it might be a Windows setting.
Try to change windows Region settings in the control panel to the language you use (subtitles are in). Reboot afterwards.





I have seen that many people had some trouble with some characters specific to their languages and that pretty much always helps (remember to reboot).

Huh, that link works for me, but it's a tricky one (depending on how your ad blocker is setup), with some false buttons. This one should be less so:
https://openload.co/f/49eIa9z_rQg/c.s01e02.720p.u1338064.Rapidmoviez.com.rar

Thanks for the locale screens. I checked them, and they're all already correct (U.S./English).

I see that the subtitle file is UTF-8-BOM and in Advanced Sub Station Alfa format (ASS), and looks like Media Player Classic doesn't support UTF... If you want you can extract the subtitle file and change the coding to ANSI. If its just this one file, I can do it and post link to the subtitles here.

How did you determine that (it's not in mediainfo or any other place I've looked yet)? That would be helpful to know, since I can compare it with other files where this doesn't happen.

UTF8 works just fine.

If i change the default font to Tahoma, then the subs are displayed fine. So it seems that the Arial font does not contain those Unicode characters.

Mind reeling: VLC uses Arial!

But sure enough, Tahoma works, and it actually looks better, too.

Admin wrote:UTF8 works just fine.
If i change the default font to Tahoma, then the subs are displayed fine. So it seems that the Arial font does not contain those Unicode characters.

Yep, that's true.

rseiler wrote:How did you determine that (it's not in mediainfo or any other place I've looked yet)? That would be helpful to know, since I can compare it with other files where this doesn't happen.

And I have used Subtitle Edit to get the subtitle from the video (you could use mkvtoolnix for example, but I got some weird stuff with the subtitles) and saved it using same format and then opened in the text editor (Notepad++ in this case) and checked the coding there. So you just need a program like Subtitle Edit and some text editor to do that.

btw, why there isn't any option in the Media Player Classic for UTF?

VLC probably uses some fallback font in case a character is missing.