Hebrew subtitles are gibberish

I tried adding subtitles to a video with gsubedit (gnome subtitles), but it's showing the subtitles as gibberish and also I opened the file and saw there gibrish.

I used the subtitle also in windows there they were in Hebrew, how can I make Ubuntu show my subtitles in Hebrew?

Thanks for helping! (:


I am using VLC player and had the same problem. I solved it by pressing the Tools tab, then open Preferences, then go to Subtitles & OSD -> change the default encoding to Hebrew (ISO 8859-8) (or whatever your language is).

Then restart VLC player. Hope it helps whoever see this post.


Had the same issue with heb sub here is what I did,:

installing Hebrew fonts packs:

sudo apt-get install culmus xfonts-efont-unicode xfonts-efont-unicode-ib xfonts-intl-european msttcorefonts

restart VLC and then choose Arial as the font and Hebrew (Windows-1255)

enter image description here


Try the VLSub extension for VLC. Use the following commands:

  • mkdir ~/.local/share/vlc/lua/
  • mkdir ~/.local/share/vlc/lua/extensions/
  • cd ~/.local/share/vlc/lua/extensions/
  • wget http://addons.videolan.org/CONTENT/content-files/148752-vlsub_0-6.lua

Next go use it in VLC's menus while watching a video.