What SRT Encoding Should I Use?

[RykGroff]

I'm adding English subtitles to a French-Canadian film and am having trouble selecting the correct encoding to display French accents (which still exist because characters are calling each other by their French names).

The accented characters are correct in my SRT file when I look at them using TextEdit but display in the burned-in subtitles as either _ or just a space. I've tried using UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 to no avail.

Any ideas?

[JohnAStebbins]

There isn't any 100% sure way to detect character encodings. But there's a python tool called chardet that may help.
I'm no OSX expert, but on linux it can be installed with:

Code: Select all

pip install chardet

[Deleted User 11865]

Even the file command can make a sometimes reasonable guess as to the character encoding. Or if you want something with a graphical interface, maybe Smultron.