Convert Subtitles to UTF-8
Subtitles showing München, é, or � instead of accents? Detect the real encoding and re-save as clean UTF-8 in your browser. Free, no upload.
Garbled characters — "München" for München, "�" boxes, question marks where accents should be — mean the file was saved in a legacy encoding (Windows-1252, ISO-8859-x) but is being read as UTF-8, or the reverse. Subtitle Doctor inspects the actual bytes: byte-order marks are honoured, strict UTF-8 validation catches legacy files, and the result is re-encoded as clean UTF-8, the one encoding every modern player agrees on. You see which encoding was detected before you download.
Worth knowing
- The fix must happen at the byte level — find-and-replace on the garbled text cannot restore characters that were already destroyed by a bad conversion.
- UTF-16 files (common from Windows Notepad "Unicode" saves) are detected by BOM and converted transparently.
- Output is UTF-8 without BOM: a BOM confuses more players than it helps, and no modern player needs one.
- If a file is valid UTF-8 already, it passes through untouched — the tool never double-converts.
FAQ
Why do accents break only on my TV but not on my laptop?
Players guess encodings differently. Your laptop player happens to guess the legacy encoding correctly; the TV assumes UTF-8. Converting the file to real UTF-8 makes every player read it identically.
My characters are already question marks in the file itself — can this restore them?
No tool can: if a previous bad conversion replaced characters with literal "?", the information is gone. Re-download the original file and convert that instead.
Which languages does the legacy fallback cover?
The current fallback is Windows-1252 (Western European). Explicit charset pickers for Central European, Cyrillic, Greek, Turkish and Arabic code pages are planned — the detection report will tell you if the default guess looks wrong.