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I am having problems with subtitles in my language. They are encoded as Western(ISO-8859-15) and therefore some characters are not displayed correctly. I am tired of replacing manually using gedit and ctrl-h and then saving as UTF-8. How to automate this process?

Waldir Leoncio
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c0dehunter
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  • The process using `iconv` will most likely work flawlessly if you are not using characters outside the English latin set. If you encounter any problems, check this answer: http://askubuntu.com/a/277580/58950 – carnendil Oct 22 '13 at 18:10

3 Answers3

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You can use iconv:

If the file is named chapter1.srt, then run:

iconv -f iso88591 -t utf8 chapter1.srt > outputfile.srt

and it will create the file, although it'll have a different name. If you move them out into another directory, then you can easily pipe them back in.

MestreLion
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nanofarad
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2

Another option is

konwert Install konwert

konwert isolatin1-utf8 inputfile.srt > outputfile.srt

Besides conversion, konwert can also be used as an encoding detector:

konwert any/en-test inputfile.srt

Which is great to get the input file encoding needed for the conversion, since both konwert and iconv requires that as argument. You must however provide a language parameter: en in any/en-test means English

It also has an option for in-place conversion, so you don't have to move and rename files afterwards:

konwert isolatin1-utf8 -O inputfile.srt
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MestreLion
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2

Also, since you're dealing with .srt files, you should really check pysrt. It has many features to manipulate subtitles, like shifting and rescaling times.

Installing:

sudo pip install pysrt

Converting to UTF-8 (it auto-detects input file encoding using either chardet or charade)

srt -i --encoding 'utf-8' shift 0s mysubtitle.srt
MestreLion
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