2013-09-16, 23:45
Currently, if i want to watch a video with chinese subtitles, I must download the srt from a site like shooter (this is easily done within xbmc using the add-on) but if I actually want to be able to read the subtitles in the srt using xbmc, i have exit xbmc, and mux the srt file into the mkv file with a program like MKV Merge GUI, then I must manually ensure that the embedded srt is encoded with the right character set (for simple chinese, the charset is GB2312) then I can open the newly muxed mkv in xbmc and select the chinese srt file and finally, i can see chinese subtitles...there is no way to select encoding or charsets for the srts directly from the xbmc gui that i am aware of...at least not in a temporary way so i can easily switch back to english subtitles if I want. I am sure that this same character encoding problem also exists with other languages.
The first step towards fixing this problem, is to give an option for charset encoding per srt file in the xbmc gui. But why stop there?
If the srt file has the language name or abbreviation in the filename, (which my subtitles all have automatically) then a chinese srt file downloaded straight from shooter thru the xbmc gui could in theory be encoded directly into simplified chinese (with the option to change encodings if, its say, I want traditional chinese subtitles) I think this would greatly enhance xbmc and make it much more approachable as a program as a whole.
The first step towards fixing this problem, is to give an option for charset encoding per srt file in the xbmc gui. But why stop there?
If the srt file has the language name or abbreviation in the filename, (which my subtitles all have automatically) then a chinese srt file downloaded straight from shooter thru the xbmc gui could in theory be encoded directly into simplified chinese (with the option to change encodings if, its say, I want traditional chinese subtitles) I think this would greatly enhance xbmc and make it much more approachable as a program as a whole.