I have Alladin in Arabic as an avi file and today I watched it to try and understand the Egyptian Arabic. A lot goes past me except that I know the story and what they're probably saying. Anyhow, naturally I wanted to add subtitles to the movie so I can understand and learn from the dialogue better.
I searched for Alladin Arabic subtitles and found some as one single srt file. I renamed the srt to have exactly the same filename (sans extension) as the avi and loaded the avi using Media Player. However, all the text came out as strange garbled characters.
To fix this problem, the subtitle file need only be opened with Word and then saved as UTF-8 which is Unicode. In other words, the original file was Arabic however Media Player didn't know that it was and it tried to use a different set of characters to match the codes it found. So, by changing to Unicode which apparently contains almost all languages, Media Player knows exactly what to display (or technically I should say it's DirectVobSub that's using the inappropriate format until I gave it Unicode to use)
The only hitch now seems to be that the subtitles are a fair bit slower than the movie i.e. they're in unison at first but as the movies goes along they begin to trail more and more. There are all sorts of subtitle manipulators to fix that up and then after that I'll be all set.
So now I have Alladin with Egyptian Arabic sound and Formal Arabic subtitles - a learning environment I feel is much better than using English subtitles with Egyptian Arabic track.
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