Convert to UTF-8
Open Convert to UTF-8This tool is server-side — your file is sent over HTTPS, processed, returned to you, and immediately discarded. Nothing is stored.
The Problem
You open a subtitle file and the text looks like this:
Witaj, jak siÄ™ masz? ← should be Polish: Witaj, jak się masz? ?????? ?? ← should be Arabic or Chinese ¿Qué estás haciendo? ← should be Spanish: ¿Qué estás haciendo?
This is an encoding mismatch. The file was saved in one character encoding (Windows-1252, ISO-8859-1, GB2312, etc.) but your player is reading it as UTF-8. The bytes that represent special characters are misinterpreted, producing garbled text.
This is extremely common because millions of subtitle files were created before UTF-8 became the universal standard, particularly on older Windows systems that defaulted to regional encodings.
How to Use It
Step 1 — Upload your file
Drag an .srt, .ass, .ssa, or .vtt file onto the upload zone. One file per operation.
Step 2 — Convert
Click Convert to UTF-8. The server detects the file's encoding using byte-frequency analysis and converts to UTF-8.
Step 3 — Download and test
The converted file downloads with the same name and extension. Open it in your player to verify the characters display correctly.
Common Encoding Scenarios
| Language / Script | Likely encoding |
|---|---|
| Western European (é, ü, ñ) | Windows-1252 / ISO-8859-1 |
| Central European (Polish, Czech, Hungarian) | Windows-1250 / ISO-8859-2 |
| Cyrillic (Russian, Bulgarian) | Windows-1251 / KOI8-R |
| Arabic, Hebrew | Windows-1256 / Windows-1255 |
| Traditional Chinese | Big5 |
| Simplified Chinese (older files) | GB2312 / GBK |
Tips
- If the output still looks garbled, the detection was uncertain — this can happen with very short files that don't have enough non-ASCII bytes for reliable detection. The output is always UTF-8, but the source encoding guess may have been wrong.
- Already UTF-8? The tool detects this and returns the file unchanged (or with BOM removed if it was UTF-8-with-BOM).
- Chinese subtitle files for Mandarin content often need this fix before using the Chinese Pinyin tool.