I've been running into a perplexing issue with subtitles that should be in Japanese. Instead, I've been getting strange characters like these:
1
00:00:01,930 --> 00:00:06,160
∞◊…´æfiÀˋ µ⁄"ªª∞
2
00:00:47,940 --> 00:00:50,600
¥½º"'Á Ƃ'Á
3
00:00:50,750 --> 00:00:51,870
Øπ∞¢¡¯ ¤
People call them Bakemoji, but I'm curious if there's a way to revert these to proper Japanese characters. I'm using VLC on macOS, and it usually works great except for this issue I've faced a couple of times, possibly with older subtitle files linked to .avi videos. Any suggestions?
1 Answer
It looks like you're dealing with one of two issues: either the subtitle file is corrupted or your system might be missing the font necessary to display the characters properly. In either case, that would cause the subtitles to display as Unicode gibberish instead of the intended Japanese. You might want to check those aspects first.

Thanks for the reply!