Subtitles show question marks or boxes? Fix the characters

The film plays, the subtitles appear on time, but the words are wrong: “café” instead of “café”, rows of question marks, or little empty boxes where Arabic or Thai letters should be. The subtitles are loading fine. Check the file’s text encoding and the font needed for its characters; the fix depends on the cause.

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Windows 11 & 10 · Guide reviewed 28 October 2026

Why letters turn into symbols

A text subtitle file, such as an SRT, is plain text. Plain text has to be stored in a character encoding: the rule that turns each letter into bytes. Today the common rule is UTF-8, which covers every alphabet in one file. Many older subtitle files were saved with a regional rule instead, one for Western European languages, another for Arabic, another for Chinese, and the file does not say which.

AIX Player reads subtitle text as UTF-8, and also as UTF-16 when the file starts with the marker that announces it (a byte-order mark). A legacy-encoded file can display incorrectly when interpreted as UTF-8; boxes can also indicate missing font glyphs. If the characters display correctly in the editor, save a copy as UTF-8; otherwise first decode it with the correct source encoding or obtain a correct copy.

Fix it: save the subtitle file as UTF-8

1. Close the video in AIX Player, then find the subtitle file next to it (for example film.srt). Make a copy first, so you can go back.
2. Open the file in Windows Notepad. Right-click it, choose Open with and pick Notepad.
3. Check how it looks in Notepad. If the words read correctly there, carry on. If Notepad shows garbled text, do not overwrite the original; try opening a copy with the correct source encoding or obtain a UTF-8 copy.
4. Save it as UTF-8. Choose File → Save as, set Encoding to UTF-8, keep the same file name and save, replacing the old file.
5. Open the video again. A subtitle file with the same name as the video loads by itself, and the letters now show correctly.

In the Notepad that comes with Windows 11, the encoding is also shown at the bottom right of the window, so you can see what a file uses before you change it.

Still wrong?

• Notepad shows the same mess. The editor may have decoded the file incorrectly; original characters are only lost if they were actually replaced in the saved data. Download the subtitle again, choosing a UTF-8 version if the site offers one.
• Only some letters are wrong. Check that you saved over the right file, then close and reopen the video: a subtitle is read when it loads.
• The subtitle is inside an MKV. Text tracks inside an MKV are normally stored as UTF-8 already. If one shows symbols, try the file’s other subtitle tracks, or add a separate subtitle file instead.

Boxes instead of letters: the font

Empty boxes can also mean that no font with those letters was available. AIX Player brings its own subtitle fonts for the scripts most often missing from a PC:

So an Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi or Thai subtitle saved as UTF-8 shows correctly even on a PC set up only for English. For other scripts, check available font coverage and the subtitle’s own font/style requirements.

Picture subtitles are never garbled this way

Blu-ray and DVD subtitles (PGS and VobSub) are pictures of text, not text, so encodings and fonts do not apply to them; they look exactly as they were made. If you have a choice between a picture track and a text file that keeps showing symbols, the picture track is a quick way round.

Other subtitle problems

• Subtitles do not appear at all: subtitles not showing.
• Subtitles appear too early or too late: fix subtitle timing.
• Text too small or hard to read: subtitle size, colour and outline.