If you’re using Plex and run into subtitle issues, it might be due to incorrect text encoding. Plex only supports UTF-8 encoded subtitle files. Luckily, converting file encodings in Linux is simple using iconv, a tool that comes preinstalled on most modern distributions.
Example: Convert from Windows-1251 to UTF-8
iconv -f WINDOWS-1251 -t UTF-8 sourcefile.srt > newfile.srtFlags explained:
--from-code,-f: Specifies the encoding of the source file.--to-code,-t: Specifies the desired encoding for the output file.
How to Detect a file’s Encoding
Before converting, you can check the current encoding of a file using uchardet:
uchardet sourcefile.srtThis tool will output the most likely character encoding of the file, which you can then use with iconv.
iconv has saved me a few times when subtitles wouldn’t display properly—didn’t realize it was usually an encoding issue until recently. Also, thanks for the tip on uchardet; I was using `file -i` but it’s not always reliable.