Fix Subtitle Encoding — Garbled Text to UTF-8

Why subtitles turn into gibberish

The "é" case: text that was garbled, then saved

Sometimes the file is already UTF-8 and still looks wrong. An app read a UTF-8 file as Western European, showed "é" for "é", and saved exactly what it showed. Converting that file to UTF-8 again changes nothing, which is why many converters fail on it. This tool maps the garbled characters back to the bytes that were misread and reads them correctly, which restores the original letters. The same works for whole languages: Russian saved this way shows as "Привет" and comes back as "Привет".

How the encoding is detected

Supported encodings

UTF-8 with or without a BOM

A byte-order mark (BOM) is an invisible marker at the start of a file that says "this is UTF-8". Web players, YouTube, editors and CapCut don't need it, so the download leaves it off by default. Some older TVs, set-top boxes, media players and Windows apps only treat a file as UTF-8 when it has one. If the downloaded file still shows the wrong letters on one of those, download again with the BOM option on.

Fixing it in the player instead

If you only need to watch the video once, many players let you choose the subtitle encoding. In VLC, the setting is under Preferences → Subtitles / OSD → Default encoding; set it to the file's encoding and reopen the video. Menu names can differ between versions. Converting the file to UTF-8 is the lasting fix, because it then shows correctly in every player and editor without changing any settings.

Your file stays on your computer

Detection and conversion run in your browser. The file is never uploaded, and nothing is kept after you close the tab.