How to Play Bulgarian/Cyrillic subtitles

Solution 1:

I came here for help, but I found the answer myself. In the VLC player menu, go to Tools, Preferences, Subtitles/OSD, then under Default Encoding choose Cyrillic (Windows-1251). You may need to restart the program in order for the change to take effect.

Успех! Ganbatte!

Solution 2:

It seems that your problem is related to the encoding of the subtitles. Check the instructions at the VLC's page on subtitles to adjust your preferences to whichever enconding was used to create the subtitle file.

Fonts in your Ubuntu installation should show cyrillic letters with no problem (anyway, that doesn't seem to be your problem).

If you need to change the encoding of your subtitle file, follow instructions given in this answer.