

You might need to restart VLC after changing these font settings.

If Arial Unicode MS is not in the list, you can download and install it from here 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.
