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Fix subtitle encoding and strange characters

Accents shown as é, Hebrew as ùìåí or שלו×, Arabic as ال, or plain ???? all mean the same thing: the file was read with the wrong text encoding. Cuemend detects it and saves a clean UTF-8 file.

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Steps

  1. Open the subtitle file in Cuemend. It checks for a byte-order mark, then valid UTF-8, then scores every common code page by how much the text looks like a real language.
  2. If the letters look right in the table, you’re done – save as UTF-8 (with BOM for older TVs and Windows players).
  3. If they still look wrong, pick the encoding in the Text encoding menu: Windows-1255 for Hebrew, 1256 for Arabic, 1251 for Russian/Cyrillic, 1250 for Polish/Czech/Hungarian, 1253 for Greek, 1254 for Turkish, GB18030/Big5 for Chinese, Shift_JIS for Japanese.
  4. If you see pairs like é or ש, the text was double-encoded: press Fix garbled characters.

Which encoding should I save?

UTF-8 works with almost every modern player, Plex, Jellyfin and smart TV. Some older TVs and DVD players only read the local code page – for them, save as Windows-1255 (Hebrew), 1256 (Arabic), 1251 (Cyrillic) and so on. Cuemend warns you if a character cannot be stored in the chosen code page.

Hebrew and Arabic punctuation on the wrong side

That’s a different problem – text direction, not encoding. See Fix → Right-to-left in the app: add direction marks, or move punctuation to the other end for players that ignore direction.

Questions and answers

Why does the same file look fine on my computer but not on my TV?

Your computer guessed the right encoding; the TV assumes another one. Save the file as UTF-8 with BOM, or in the code page the TV expects.

Question marks instead of letters – can they be recovered?

Only if the file still contains the original bytes. If someone already saved it with “?” in place of the letters, the letters are gone; you need another copy of the subtitles.

Last updated: 2026-10-26