UTF8 subs in get_iplayer

[Jon Davies]

On 9 March 2013 20:13, Mark Barker <mark.barker at shaw.ca> wrote:
> Hi Jon,

please write to the get-iplayer list, not to me directly.

> I was just updating all things get_iplayer on my Win7 x64 setup today. One
> thing I noticed is that your git repo commit:-
>... modifies the character encoding used in the .srt files generated by
> get_iplayer - my Notepad++ identifies the encoding of these files as "ANSI
> as UTF-8" (I believe this is Notepad++'s nomenclature for a UTF-8 encoding
> without a BOM).
>
> This actually BREAKS the default behaviour when subsequently muxing these
> .srt files into .mkv containers using mkvtoolnix (mkvmerge GUI)
> i.e. if I mux the .mp4 and .srt (with its new "ANSI as UTF-8" .srt output
> format) into an .mkv, I have to take an extra step to manually override the
> character encoding type (charset) for the .srt file in the mkvmerge GUI (to
> UTF-8), else the resultant .mkv will end up have corrupted subs for some of
> the special characters, e.g. £
>
> I would actually prefer it if this 'new' format change was an option and not
> the default behaviour of get_iplayer, since this has been working without
> incident for me since forever previously! Failing that, a get_iplayer
> cmdline fallback option to the non-UTF-8 original encoding would be much
> appreciated.

seems a reasonable view.  I'll have a think about what makes a
sensible option, and think again what constitutes sensible default
behaviour, and propose a patch.  But I note that mkvmerge converts the
subtitles to UTF-8 if they're not already that.  Unless someone else
gets there before me.

Jon