Subtitle encoding issue with mkvtoolnix

Question

So, I've attached a few subtitles to a MKV with mkvtoolnix, but it appears that after muxing, the character encoding is messed up.

The input subtitles were UTF-8 encoded. I don't know what's the character encoding that mkvtoolnix has set, but it's not UTF-8, even though they appear in the list as S_TEXT/UTF-8.

In the "format specific options," the character encoding was set to "default" and I think this was the issue, because mkvtoolnix cannot detect UTF-8-encoded files apparently, and you need to specifically select UTF-8.

Now, the problem is that I deleted the original subtitles and the ones from the new MKV file have some weird encoding. I'd like to extract and recode them again to UTF-8, but I don't know what is the real encoding that was set by mkvtoolnix. Does anyone know how could I find out?

I noticed that the extracted subs are in UTF-8 format, so I guess mkvtoolnix converted my UTF-8 files to ANSI, then UTF-8. If this is true, is there any way I can recover the original characters?

Answer 1

I think that I have encountered the same kind situation and what has happened is that mkvmerge has not detected that files are already UTF-8, as there was no BOM, and has encoded again.