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roverdog
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Oct 24, 2008 11:28 am
Location: Sweden
Contact: Website

Arabic subtitles using streaming windows media and SMI

Fri Oct 24, 2008 11:42 am

HI everyone
I am desperately trying to get arabic subtitles to work with streaming windows media in Windows Media Player.

I can get the stream and the SMI-file to synch allright,
But I cannot get the arabic text to show arabic. Instead i get all kinds of strange characters, but its not Arabic.

I am tryng to help a crew that want to start online video rentals in Dubai, so I cannot show you the url:s in question (rights issues).

Has anyone successfully done this?
What ideas do you guys have?
Streaming Solutions Scandinavia AB works to help companies and organisations put their video on the Internet. Streaming and download made easy and efficient. Making your streams come true...
ixquic
Posts: 73
Joined: Wed Aug 23, 2006 4:39 pm

Wed Oct 29, 2008 4:25 pm

This happens when the subtitles use a different text encoding from the computer they're played on.

I don't use WMP, so I don't know how to set the encoding there. Anyway, the best thing is to convert the subtitles to Unicode, because it handles all languages and should work without any custom settings.

One way to convert to Unicode is with Microsoft Word:
* Rename the .smi file to .txt because Word treats SAMI differently.
* Open the file in Word. Most of the times it will already suggest the right encoding. If it doesn't (garbled text in the preview), click on "Other encoding" and choose one from the list. In your case probably "Arabic (Windows)".
* Verify that the text is readable in Word.
* Save the file as "Text only", but choose the UTF-8 encoding (or "Unicode" which is UTF-16). Opensubtitles supports UTF-8 too.
* Rename back to .smi

For many files, you can drag them all into Word so they open one by one. (Drag into the title bar, not the main area!) Of course if they're all the same encoding you could write a small macro.

If anyone knows a handy tool that does batch conversion to Unicode automagically and reliably, I would be very thankful to hear about it.
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